The church and the hour, reflections of a socialist churchwoman

The Church and the Hour

The
Church and the Hour

Reflections of a Socialist Churchwoman

By
Vida D. Scudder, A.M.

J 9 y* ■

New York

E. P. Button & Co.

681 Fifth Avenue

T T ^- ) / T:V\

786085 :

'■or:, LENOX At.'O t

Copyright, 19 17

BY

E. P. DUTTON & CO.

Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

Although this little book is entitled Papers
by a Socialist Churchwoman, there is no
discussion of socialism in it. This is because
the author does not feel that the Church at
large should be called upon to commit itself to
any Ism, or special set of economic doctrines.
She does not see, to be candid, how an in-
telligent Christian can help being a socialist.
But that is her narrowness. She is obliged
to confess that many devout and able minds
do not embrace the creed so dear to her; and
she is not concerned in this place with propa-
ganda, but with considering the distinctive
work and function of the Church as it is. If
she is privately convinced that such action
and attitude as this book calls for will lead
all communicants ultimately to the socialist
position, that is her own affair and might form
the subject of another book. Her effort has
been to pierce below controversy; to be very
practical ; above all, to suggest only what every-

VI

Preface

one on reflection must agree that honest
discipleship to the Son of Mary under modern
conditions would involve.

It may be noticed that some of the papers
strike a more pessimistic and critical note
than others in regard to the probability of the
Church's furnishing effective social leadership.
That is because these papers were written
at intervals during the last five years, and
circumstances have caused the prospect to
appear now brighter, now darker. That the
Introduction which is the latest written
should also be the most optimistic, may be
of good augury.

CONTENTS

PAGS

Preface v

Introduction ...... i

The Alleged Failure of the Church to
Meet the Social Emergency. Paper
Presented at the Church Congress in
Norfolk, Va., May, 191 6 . . .40

The Church's Opportunity. (Reprinted from
The Churchman, 191 3) . . . . 74

Two Letters to the Masses. (Reprinted

from The Masses, Dec., 191 5, Feb., 191 6) . 95

Why Does Not the Church Turn Socialist?

(Reprinted from r/ie CowwgiVa/ion, 1 91 3) . 103

A Plea for Social Intercession. (Reprinted

irom The Churchman) . . . .119

The Sign of the Son of Man . . .131

yn

The Church and the Hour

Christian democracy applied to indus-
try means the development of cooperative
relations to the fullest possible extent.
The Church should therefore clearly
teach the principle of the fullest possible
cooperative control and ownership of in-
dustry and the natural resources upon
which industry depends, in order that
men may be spurred to develop the
methods that shall express this principle.
Report oj the Commission on the
Church and Social Service to the
Quadrennial Meeting oj the Federal
Council of the Churches oj Christ in
America, December, iqi6.

The Church and the Hour

Papers by a Socialist Churchwoman

INTRODUCTION

The papers presented in this little book
were written for widely varying publics.
The longer were contributed to Church papers
or delivered before Church audiences ; some of
the shorter were printed in the socialist press
and addressed to people who have no point of
contact with the Church. But all had one
object: to promote better understanding be-
tween the religious world which fears social
revolution, and the unchurched world of radical
passion which desires it.

These two worlds are nearer each other
than is commonly supposed or than either

2 The Church and the Hour

realizes. Among radicals, the irrepressible
hunger for spiritual experience stirs here and
there unmistakably. And this in spite of
bitter abuse and scorn lavished not on Christ
Himself but on His followers. It is all very
well to assert that "The Church is Judas
Iscariot/' that creeds are dead and that no
cult of an Oriental god can solve modem
problems. One may gather such assertions
by the handful from the pages of the radical
press. But through the defiance of the
authors nms more and more a note of doubt.
For the truth is that creeds are not dead but
very much alive, that the ''Oriental god" is
still to countless men the one Master of the
world's salvation, and that the churches,
akin rather to Peter than to Judas, are almost
awake to the peril in which they have been of
betraying their Lord. Their vast reservoirs
of social power have been long ice-boimd.
But the ice is breaking, the waters begin to
move. It is not beyond hope, that soon these
waters may be released, to flow forth, at the
moment when the need of the world is greatest,
in streams that shall be for the heahng of the
nations.

Introduction 3

The social awakening of the churches is the
great fact which this little book would signal,
and in its modest way would further.

It is full time that the critics of the Church,
— and they are many, including some of her
most loyal children, — should become aware
of the advanced position which various official
Christian groups are now taking at last on
questions concerning social justice. From one
point of view, to be sure, official statements
cotmt for nothing. If too far ahead of the
public conscience, they become inert formulas,
and formula not translated into life are the
ancient curse of religion. On the other hand,
hoWever, if the Church finds no corporate
expression for the restlessness and compunc-
tion that consume Christian hearts to-day,
she will soon deserve the contempt or in-
difference which she is sure to inspire. The
Spirit ever works at first secretly, kindling
in the wills of the faithful fires that cannot be
concealed; but in due time these fires light
on the altar of the Church flames that shall
illumine the world.

Not very long ago, Christians who felt
the revolutionary implications of their faith

4 The Church and the Hour

looked in vain to the churches for any en-
coiiragement or endorsement. To draw out
the social significance of the Gospels, to define
Christian duty in terms of industrial justice
for an industrial age, was a task wholly
neglected and desperately necessary. As
recently as the time of Maurice and Kingsley,
it was attempted by English Christianity
only through sweeping generalities if at all,
and these noble pioneers were distrusted by
religious authorities and silenced in religious
circles. As lately as the time of Phillips
Brooks, the task could be ignored by a great
spiritual leader. But it cannot be ignored any
longer, and the power to rest in generalities
is past. Concrete and stinging must be the
application of Christian ideals made by the
Church to modem civilization and modem
Christian lives. The last years have taught
all who watch Europe that there are no
heights of sacrifice to which humanity will
refuse to rise if the summons soimds au-
thentic.

But if the Church has failed to offer any
social leadership through official channels, at
least the voice of great chiu-chmen pleading

Introduction 5

for justice has never been silent down the
Christian ages:

"So destructive a passion is avarice that to
grow rich without injustice is impossible. . . .
But what if a man succeeded to his father's
inheritance? Then he received what has been
gathered by injustice. For ... of the many
who were before him somebody must un-
justly have taken and enjoyed the goods of
others . . . because God left the earth free to
all alike. Why then if it is common, have you
so many acres of land, and your neighbor has
not a portion of it?" — Henry George is not
speaking: that is St. Chrysostom.

"It will be objected to holding goods in
common that governments will perish because
no one cares to preserve common property.
But no, if that law were in force, states would
be most excellently preserved. . . . For
goods are to be cared for in proportion to their
excellence. Now goods held in common are
the best of all, — therefore, they must be
cared for most perfectly." That is not a
modem syndicalist utterance, it is Wyclif in
his youth, writing his De Dominio Civile,

Quotations equally telling might be mul-

6 The Church and the Hour

tiplied from age to age. But statements
bearing the stamp of ecclesiastical authority
are harder to seek. An outstanding fact is
the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum
Novarum, dating from 1891. It reads mildly
enough now, but it was considered at the
time to be very socialistic in tendency, and it
does call for a revised concept of Christian
duty, in the light of the modem economic
situation. From the dawn of the twentieth
century, expressions of social faith slowly ap-
pear; so that some day, history may narrate
the capture of the modem Church by a social
Christian ideal. Among English-speaking
Christians, the first striking group-utterance
of the century was perhaps that of the Lam-
beth Conference of 1908. It sotmds rather
faint beside St. Chrysostom, but is good as
far as it goes:

''What is now needed is . . . groups of
Christian men and women in every place
determined to make it their aim to bring the
sense of justice and righteousness which is
common to Christianity and to Democracy,
to bear upon the matters of every-day life in
trade, in society, and wherever their influence

Introduction 7

extends: and to stir up public opinion on
behalf of the removal of wrong wherever it
may be found, thus making an earnest en-
deavor to share in the transforming work of
Christianity for their brethren and com-
panions' sake." It would be interesting to
know to whom this statement was due.

In this country, viewing all organized
Christianity together, the first impressive
landmark is the platform adopted by the
Federal Coimcil of Churches in Chicago,
1912:

^'The churches must stand:

"i. For equal rights and complete justice
for all men in all stations of life.

^'2. For the protection of the family, by
the single standard of purity, uniform divorce
laws, proper regulation of marriage, and
proper housing.

^'3. For the fullest possible development
for every child, especially by the provision of
proper education and recreation.

'*4. For the abolition of child labor.

^^5. For such regulation of the conditions
of toil for women as shall safeguard the physi-
cal and moral health of the community.

8 The Church and the Hour

'*6. For the abatement and prevention of
poverty.

"7. For the protection of the individual
and society from the social, economic, and
moral waste of the liquor traffic.

"8. For the conservation of health.

"9. For the protection of the worker from
dangerous machinery, occupational diseases,
and mortality.

*' 10. For the right of all men to the oppor-
tunity for self-maintenance, for safeguarding
this right against encroachments of every
kind, and for the protection of workers from
the hardships of enforced unemployment.

''11. For suitable provision for the old
age of the workers, and for those incapacitated
by injury.

'*I2. For the right of employees and
employers alike to organize; and for adequate
means of conciliation and arbitration in indus-
trial disputes.

"13. For a release from employment one
day in seven.

"14. For the gradual and reasonable re-
duction of the hours of labor to the lowest
practicable point, and for that degree of

Introduction 9

leisure for all which is a condition of the
highest human life.

"15. For a living wage as a minimum in
every industry, and for the highest wage that
each industry can afford.

"16. For a new emphasis upon the appli-
cation of Christian principles to the acquisition
and use of property, and for the most equitable
division of the product of industry that can
ultimately be devised."

That document certainly registers a great
advance on the statement of the Lambeth
Conference. It is the work of minds trained
not only to social emotion but to practical
social thinking, and it is cognizant of specific
modem issues. Claims as extreme as any
radical could make are interspersed among
definite points which, taken together, remind
one of the platform of the Progressive Party,
— a document, it may incidentally be said,
modeled if report speak true on this very pro-
gram. "Equal rights and complete justice for
all men," "The abatement and prevention of
poverty, " " The most equitable division of the
product of industry that can ultimately be de-
vised" . . . the words have a vigorous ring,

lo The Church and the Hour

and they are redeemed from the suggestion of
verbiage without vision, by the practical propo-
sitions in regard to child-labor, the minimum
wage, pensions, the right to organize, the reduc-
tion of working hours "to the lowest practicable
point," and the like. It is an admirable pro-
gram. It sets a mark to which many of the
separate churches have not yet begun to attain.
In the quadrennial meeting of the same
Council, held in St. Louis, Dec. 191 6, this
program was reaffirmed, with a preamble
well worth quoting:

STATEMENT OF SOCIAL FAITH

The Federal Council of the Churches of
Christ in America expresses again the deepen-
ing conviction that the scope of the gospel
and the program of the churches must include
the creation on earth of a Christian civili-
zation, organized upon the ethical teachings
and controlled by the spirit of Jesus Christ.

In addition to the unquestioned historic
mission and work of Christianity with the
individual, we understand this to involve
certain great social accomplishments; that

Introduction ii

among these are: the aboHshment of war; the
transformation of the dangerous commercial
rivalries of the nations into a just and
brotherly cooperation; the coming together
on terms of equality and justice of capitalist,
employer, workers, and the constmiing public
in brotherly cooperative effort, and the shift-
ing of industry from off its basis of profits
upon that of human welfare; the lifting of the
women of the world to a position of freedom
and equality with the men of the world; the
destruction of the curse of strong drink; the
control of the infectious diseases which afflict
humanity; the control of the vices of the race;
the removal of the handicap of poverty from
submerged millions of people of all nations;
the uplift of backward races and their freedom
from the permanent and enforced domination
of more powerful peoples; the extension of
democracy throughout the earth, and the
development of its efficiency and honesty,
with the supreme emphasis upon the spiritual
values of human life. Many of these object-
ives, perhaps all of them in their wider reaches
are the work of generations ; but they are with-
in the power of himian effort when sustained

12 The Church said the Hour

and scientifically organized, and henceforth
they are to be ever before the churches.
They call for faith and consecrated endeavor
on an unprecedented scale.

The whole report is full of practical and
pertinent suggestions.

Among the churches, the Anglican or Pro-
testant-Episcopal,— a body rather shy of its
own name, but at present legally known by the
latter title — has usually been reckoned one
of the most instinctively conservative and
aristocratic. But the last two General Con-
ventions have taken action which at least
partially exonerates it from this accusation.
The Convention meets triennially, with two
Houses, a House of Bishops and a Lower
House of Clergy and Lay Deputies, and it is
the official organ of the Church. In 19 lo,
the Convention endorsed the appointment of
a Social Service Commission.- In 19 13, this
Commission was actually appointed, and got
to work, being confirmed in 1916. In the
meantime, local Social Service Commissions
were appointed in many provinces, dioceses,
and parishes, until the organization of this

Introduction 13

new activity is on the way to become as
thorough as that of the missionary activities
of the Church, with which, in the mind of
members of the Commission, it should run
parallel. The Joint Commission has been
occupied largely in aiding the creation of this
machinery and in preparing itself to cooperate
with the other commissions; it has published
some excellent literature, it conducted an
effective educational campaign during the
Convention of 191 6, and it is preparing con-
ferences on a large scale, for the consideration
of economic and social problems from the
strictly Christian point of view, to be held in
different sections of the country. Its chief
aim is not the undertaking of practical reforms,
which must in the nature of things lie outside
its scope, but the social education of each
communicant and each child of the Church;
and the reception of its study courses and
pamphlets shows how ready the Church and
its members are to welcome just such work.

But the Convention did more than appoint
a Commission. In both 191 3 and 19 16 it
took a definite stand on social fundamentals.
In 1 91 3, the following Resolution was passed;

14 The Church and the Hour

Whereas, The moral and spiritual welfare
of the people demands that the highest possi-
ble standard of living should everywhere be
maintained and that all conduct of industry
should emphasize the search for such higher
and more human forms of organization as will
genuinely elicit the personal definite stake in
the system of production to which the worker's
life is given; and

Whereas, Injustice and disproportionate
inequality as well as misunderstanding, preju-
dice, and mutual distrust as between employer
and employee are widespread in our social and
industrial life to-day:

Therefore, be it Resolved, The House
of Bishops concurring, that we, the members
of the General Convention of the Protestant
Episcopal Church, do hereby afQrm that the
Church stands for the ideal of social justice,
and that it demands the achievement of a
social order in which the social cause of poverty
and the gross himian waste of the present
order shall be eliminated, and in which every
member shall have a just return for what he
produces, a free opportunity for self -develop-
ment, and a fair share in all the gains of

Introduction 15

progress. And since such a social order can
only be achieved progressively by the efforts
of men and women who in the spirit of Christ
put the common welfare above private gain,
the Church calls upon every commimicant,
clerical and lay, seriously to take part in the
study of the complex conditions under which
we are called upon to live, and so to act
that the present prejudice and injustice may
be supplanted by mutual understanding,
sympathy, and just dealing, and the ideal
of a thoroughgoing democracy may be fully
realized in our land.

That is advanced, in its outspoken repudia-
tion of Laisser-faire, and its assertion that
spiritual welfare demands the highest possible
standard of living, — an assertion which sen-
timental and other-worldly Christians are
always loath to admit, and which indeed if
literally and individually applied might carry
us into strange regions. It is also fine in
maintaining that disproportionate inequality
obtains in social and industrial life to-day,
and in its statement that the Church demands
a social order in which the social cause of

i6 The Church and the Hour

poverty shall be eliminated. If Christians at
large would only recognize the responsibil-
ity of religion per se to eliminate the social
cause of poverty, instead of claiming too often
that religion has nothing to do with the matter,
the struggle for justice would be half won.

But when the Resolution passes from general
statements to definite recommendations, it
betrays a generation still in the fog. The non-
committal appeal, or instruction, to commiuni-
cants, is a decided drop from the first part of
the statement. They are asked chiefly to
study conditions: also, so to act that justice
and sympathy may be promoted and the
ideal of democracy be realized. It is true that
study must precede action and that the first
step onward is to create a right temper in
Christian people, but one may doubt whether
these general adjurations, excellent as they
are, would make any difference to the readers
of them. Certainly, communicants in 191 7
ought to be and are ready for more definite
guidance.

Such guidance they get, in respect both to
thought and action, from a Resolution passed
at the General Convention in the autumn

Introduction 17

of 1 91 6. It is simpler and briefer than the
statements hitherto quoted, and it omits all
denimciation of the present system, as well as
any attempt to formulate the ultimate prin-
ciples of a Christian social order. It is ad-
dressed to the Church as it is, not to the
Church as radicals want it to be; for as has
felicitously been said, the Church is not a
radical body, but a bourgeois body touched
with compunction. But in spite of the quiet
tone of the Resolution, it implies the necessity
for profound change as thoroughly as does the
Resolution of 1913; it cuts deeper into the
matter of private conduct and starts in at
least on the difficult and unusual task of sug-
gesting to Christian people precise points at
which through their personal action social re-
formation might begin :

Be it Resolved, That the service of the
community and the welfare of the workers, not
primarily private profits, should be the aim
of every industry and its justification; and
that the Church should seek to keep this aim
constantly before the mind of the public;
and that Christians as individuals are under

1 8 The Church and the Hour

the obligation on the one hand conscientiously
to scrutinize the sotirces of their income, and
on the other hand to give moral support and
prayer to every just effort to secure fair
conditions and regular employment for wage-
earners and the extension of true democracy
to industrial matters.

Production for use and not for private
profit is the very nucleus of socialist theory.
Social revolution is not too strong a phrase to
describe the cleavage that would ensue be-
tv/een our present methods and a civilization
governed by that central principle in its
economics. To call on the Church constantly
to keep this transformation before the pub-
lic mind is to place a new responsibility on
every clergyman and communicant. As for
the command that Christians scrutinize the
sources of their incomes, it does not at first
sotmd very drastic. St. Chrysostom and the
socialist local will agree in going further and
telling us that we ought not to have any
incomes at all. Perhaps, however, if we
scrutinize sources thoroughly and conscien-
tiously, there may not in the long nm be much

Introduction 19

income left. If Christian people in general
should discover by any chance that the sources
of income under the present system can rarely
bear scrutiny, when exposed to the flash-
light of conscience, they may decide that the
present system has got to go.

''Moral support and prayer" for every
just effort of the wage-earners or others to
secure fair conditions for labor is a suggestion
which cuts at the center. What Chris-
tendom really prays for, it will work for and
will gain. How much praying is the habit of
Christian hearts as a regular part of their
religious duty, when strikes are in progress,
one wonders? And what about moral support?
Too often. Church people behave as if in-
dustrial or legislative struggles were none of
their concern. Parochial activities, Sunday-
Schools, Girls* Friendly, Missions, — these are
their concern and the concern of the Church.
The other matters are out of her province, and
indifference masked in htimility declines to
hold an opinion about them. All this should
now be changed. If people obey the summons
of the Church, as expressed both in 191 3 and
191 6, they can no longer easily assume that

20 The Church and the Hour

it is none of their responsibility to make
up their minds about the jights in a labor
war. It is their Christian business to attend
to such matters, to have opinions when pos-
sible, to take sides, and to support the
struggle of and for the workers, whenever
they shall consider it just, — not otherwise, —
with their sympathy and with their prayers.
The last phrase, about the extension of de-
mocracy to industry, may help them a little
in this difficult matter of forming an opinion.
It affords a guiding principle, in the light
of which the decision where to throw one's
sympathy in concrete cases becomes easier.
This Resolution of 19 16 was enthusiastically
and unanimously adopted by the Bishops, and
endorsed by the Lower House. It is not the
expression of a conservative-minded body, it is
the expression of brave men.

In the light of these statements, it is no
longer possible to complain that the Churches
are silent. The social feeling of individual
Christians may still so outstrip any corpo-
rate Church expression that it commands a
new horizon ; but this is rarely true of their

Introduction 21

social action. If Church members would
pursue the course of conduct implied in these
recent formulae, they would make their Chris-
tianity a visible fact, forced on the recognition
of everyone. They would live in a mountain
city, set on high for all to see as their Master
pictured them, instead of settling down, con-
tentedly to all appearance, as they mostly do
now, among other folk in the sordid cities of
the plain.

' ' He that hath an ear, let him hear what the
Spirit saith unto the Churches."

II

There are two interesting points in connec-
tion with these formulae. The first is, that in
all of them, the attack on the existing order
is scrupulously from the moral, not the eco-
nomic end. The last Resolution of the Epis-
copal Convention was even commended by the
New York Thnes on this account! Even the
program of the Federal Council, though it
treads debatable ground, treads it with such
cautious steps that it would be hard for any

22 The Church and the Hour

Christian to disagree with its practical de-
mands. This reticence is wise. For it is a
pity that the Church should take controversial
positions with which honest Christians can
disagree, when there are so many positions out
of the reach of legitimate controversy which are
nevertheless quite revolutionary in character!
Such honest Christians ought not to have
their freedom of thinking violated by ex-
cathedra pronouncements from the Church.
To be allowed to think foolishly, if we must
think foolishly to think honestly, is a preroga-
tive hardly won, which the race must very
jealously guard: all of us need the protection
of it sometimes, and to deny that sacred right
leads straight to the Inquisition. In this new
function of social guidance on which the
Church is seemingly entering, she needs to
practice very delicate discrimination. To
get up a party which shall fight to gain the
endorsement of the Church for this measure or
that program is an attractive short-cut to
social Christianity, but it is a short-cut that
leads to By-Ends' Meadows and will end by
plimging the Church into the morass of politics.
Socialists claim, and rightly, that the lack of

Introduction 23

thinking in economic terms is fatal to a sense
for reality, and every Christian is under orders
to learn how to think in these terms. But the
business of the Church as a Church is to trans-
late them into Christian ethics. This is good
strategics; it creates a far more salutary
annoyance to press home the disturbing
truths to which Christians are nominally
committed by virtue of their allegiance, in
language which no Christian can challenge,
than to deal in alien technicalities. In the
statements just quoted, it is hard to find any-
thing which the Christian disciple could deny,
short of making the fundamental assertion
that the relations of men in this world are
none of his business. This is why those
statements are effective. Economic programs
are necessary in their place, but one does
not need to adopt the specious "dynamic"
theory of the Church to see that this place is
not in Church formulas.

Nor does this opinion invite the Church to
take refuge in evasive platitudes, — an easy
alternative all too readily embraced on occa-
sion by bishops and other clergy, not to speak
of the laity. It means that the Church has a

24 The Church and the Hour

distinctive and difficult work to do. To probe
to the quick, to trouble people, to sting them
into courses of action that involve iinconven-
tionality, pluck, readiness for adventure, —
that is her duty. But this sort of result is
gained only by direct appeal to heart and
conscience. Possibly the teaching of the
Church, if it is sincere, must lead those who
obey to share the fate of their Master, Who
was pursued by the venomous enmity of
the respectable classes of His day, and was
finally executed as a criminal by the unani-
mous will of the religious and the secular
authorities. That ought to suffice. Let the
Church speak her own language. If bravely
and consistently uttered, if faithfully obeyed,
it will be found to correspond closely with
economic theories quite at variance with
those on which society now more or less
uneasily reposes; and, under pressure from
two diverse directions making for one same
end, the world may find itself transformed.

The other point to notice about these
statements is that the Church is not appealing
especially to the working classes. She is not
thinking in terms of class at all. What is in

Introduction 25

her mind is no movement pushed from behind
by the sharp prong of economic distress, it is
rather a general movement impelled by such
single-hearted passion for justice as should be
common to all people. And here again, her
policy will discredit her in many radical minds.
Those who cling to the Marxian bcHef that
substantial progress is won only by the
rebellion of the oppressed, will scorn the ap-
peal to disinterested action. Nor are the
Marxians alone. Whether one looks at nations
or at classes, a widespread feeling that no
group of men will ever act contrary to their
own interests, and that the future of the world
must be determined by balance of greeds, cuts
the nerve of idealist effort. Some w^arm ideal-
ists are among those who distrust a general
appeal. They too feel that the slow pressure
of the working classes toward power is the
one effective hope for freedom ; and they think
that the most useful thing for a lover of justice
to do is to unclass himself and to throw in his
lot with the proletarian struggle.

Now there is a misunderstanding here
which needs to be cleared up.

It is true that this upward movement of men

26 The Church and the Hour

seeking expansion and freedom is the most
salient and inevitable fact of history. For
the first sacred duty imposed on nations, on
classes, on individuals, is the search for life's
fulfillment. Fullness of life must precede any
impulse toward sacrifice. Life must be whole
before it can be offered ; there was no mutila-
tion of Our Lord's Body on the Cross. It
was a perfect Humanity which there gave
itself in an oblation full, perfect, and sufficient
for the sins of the whole world.

And so, while the Church cannot endorse
the crass forms of economic determinism, and
will never yield to a materialistic interpreta-
tion of history, she is not debarred from warm
sympathy with the class struggle. Far from
being debarred from such sympathy. Chris-
tian people are called to it. So long as they
can applaud the self-defense of a small nation,
they cannot condemn the self-defense of a
weak class. Beyond the fogs in which we
grope, shines the fair intermittent vision of a
non-resistant humanity; we look at it wist-
fully and honor those conscientious objectors
who even now seek to walk in its light. But
to invoke that vision when a big people

Introduction 27

tramples down a little people, is not yet
within the compass of much Christian thought.
Equally beyond that compass should be dis-
approval or indifference toward the fight of
working-class groups to preserve or enlarge
their liberties. Feeble girl garment -workers
learning to stand together for their rights
with the light of battle dawning in their eyes,
respond to the rhythmic stress which is
evolving life throughout the universe; they
are part of the God-consciousness ever quick-
ening in the clay. The struggle for freedom is
righteous and religious, whether it be found
in striking miner or in outraged nation, and
Christian hearts must recognize in it the
motions of the Lord and Giver of Life.

Yet this struggle, whether in the form of
demand for better wages and hours, or for
political independence, is on the lower range
of human action, on the range of the natural
life. The Church is one with nature, one it
may almost be said with common sense, in
approving it; but the Church as Church has
no relation to it at all. For her business is
with life on the higher level, the life regenerate.
On this level she must teach, from this level

28 The Church and the Hour

she must appeal. Her distinctive song is not
the Marseillaise, though she does not forbid
her children to sing it; it is the Vexilla
Regis, The Royal Banner under which her
host advances against the host of evil, is the
banner of the Cross.

Naturally, the world scoffs, nor can any one
be surprised at its scepticism in face of the
spectacle of history. Perhaps non-religious
people may long have to remain bound in the
chains of scepticism and economic determin-
ism; perhaps the best they can share is the
lower though holy enthusiasm of the fighters
for freedom on the lower plane. None the
less, the Church knows that the world is
wrong. Hers is no cynic distrust, no pseudo-
scientific fatalism. She is aware of a secret
principle, working counter to the indrawing
principle that claims and appropriates, — the
outgoing principle that sacrifices and gives.
The Church knows that man is the child of
God by adoption and grace, and that he can
rise to God-like action ; for she has marked his
brow with the Holy Sign. Baptismal Regen-
eration is a doctrine consigned to the rear of
most Christian minds. If it means anything,

Introduction 29

it means a triumphant refutation of the
determinist. It asserts that Christian folk
can be appealed to en masse, to act on a
supernatural level, where their private inter-
est will yield instinctively and as a matter
of course, to the general good.

The Church's faith in a regenerate human-
ity is not much in evidence just now. To
regain it, she must descend into the depths of
her most mystical convictions. If she can get
even a wee mustard-seed measure of that
faith, she can say to the mountains of class-
greed and privilege. Be ye cast down and
thrown into the sea. They would crumble
away, those mountains, they would fall in
crashing avalanche, down, down, till no vestige
of them remained. Her opportunity and her
power are unique, if she will greatly dare.
Her beHef that the whole body of Christian
people coming under her jurisdiction can and
must be raised to distintercsted social action,
makes her mistress of a province all her own.
It is her distinctive contribution to the present
crisis. So far, she has at best only reiterated
what other right-minded bodies are saying,
but it is inconceivable that she should pause

30 The Church and the Hour

there. Far from merely echoing approval of
measures which secular agencies endorse,
which even the Government in some cases
begins to further, she might take the initiative.
Her work is not to announce new economic
theories, it is only incidentally to approve
specific programs. It is to insist that her
children sift theories uncompromisingly in the
light of Christian idealism; it is above all to
offer the incentive which shall draw men to try
the Great Adventure of Christian living in
terms of the new age.

Ill

The Church must not only call to action,
she must show the way to it. And that is more
difficult, for even honest eyes see such a tangle
of paths ! And the Hill of Calvary, from which
the only true way reaches, rises very far from
modern vision. But perhaps in these heart-
rending days, eyes purged with tears are grow-
ing more able to discern it.

Two special phases of social consecration are
demanded by the present crisis. The one con-
cerns the private life of the individual, the other
the group-life of the Christian community.

Introduction 31

As to the private life: in one direction, the
Christian worid has been sufficiently in-
structed. One would not dare say that it did
its duty, but certainly unless it is deaf it
knows where that duty lies. This is the
direction of practical activity. Social Service
is the word of the hour, and the constant
message of the pulpit calls people to devote
themselves to it. Optimism sees most people
obeying the call. Nearly all serious-minded
folk give a large portion of their spare time,
not to amusement or self-culture, but to one
of the multiform modem ways of promoting
the Kingdom of God. If one sometimes
wonders whether it was meant that this
Kingdom should be promoted by sitting on
committees, one crushes the unworthy thought.
If a good deal of effort is amateurish and
wasted, one renews one's faith that aim and
effort are the really creative things. Splendid
works are carried on effectively, — till one
measures them against the need they try to
meet. And better perhaps than all Church
activities, is the other effect of the ideal of
service: the socializing of the professions. In
every pursuit, the motive of service can be

32 The Church and the Hour

made central. If it cannot, that is no pursuit
for Christian men.

But beyond action, He the more searching
questions connected with fundamental atti-
tude toward possessions, toward the world.
And here each socially enlightened Christian
must judge for himself. The Church, catching
up with her more progressive members, begins
to demand the application of Christian ethics
to regions once left to the control of automatic
law, like buying goods and investing money.
A pioneer excitement attaches to the pene-
tration of these regions. And very soon, in
reaction from the difficulties encountered
there, comes the obvious suggestion, since the
present order is so involved in wrong that to
Christianize it is at best a task of infinite
subtlety and delicacy, and at worst may
prove impossible, — ^why not leave it alto-
gether? From the earliest Christian days,
ardent souls have yearned for a complete
renimciation of the world. Is not the way
out a new Franciscanism, which shall lure
men to throw away all that others hold
precious in a divine madness, and to abandon
themselves recklessly to love?

Introduction 33

If it could be done! But how can it? The
entire repudiation of worldly goods, the
severance from earthly ties, so familiar to
exalted and eager souls in the Middle Ages, —
are we self -deceived in finding it harder to
compass now than then ? Short of a monastery
or a desert, neither of which was Francis's
idea or the idea of Jesus, one cannot renounce
the world. It creeps into the tissue of our
simplest clothing, it lurks in our shelters, it
penetrates our food. And ought one to try to
renounce it? Apart from the basic impossibil-
ity of the thing, apart from one's weakness,
two obstacles stand in the way.

The first is our honest modern disbehef in
asceticism. We no longer feel the world to be
a peril or an evil, we find in it the Sacrament of
God's Presence, and the motive driving men to
withdraw from it is no longer plain. Perhaps
we moderns are making a mistake here. It is
conceivable that a reaction may come, and
an ascetic revival, perhaps reaching us from
the East, may be in order. But, the second
obstacle is more surely honorable, for it is
found in the very growth of social feeling.
Twentieth-century minds cannot sympathize

34 The Church and the Hour

unreservedly with St. Francis flinging his
garments in his father's face; they cannot
help thinking of the father! The tender
duties, that held Tolstoy to the end from his
heart's desire, hold us all. This is not weak-
ness. It is the growth of democracy, making
us indifferent to saving ourselves by ourselves,
inhibiting us from claiming perfection at the
cost of hurt to others. We are all involved
together, and to break loose, leaving our dear
ones in the net, is no way to follow Love.
That old selfish way, which ended in serenely
creating a spiritual aristocracy, was natural
to aristocratic ages, but it is now alien to our
best instincts. We no longer find our solution
in a segregated Christianity; for we have
learned to pray. Thy Kingdom come on earth.
Not that we Christians are wholly thrown
back by any means on self-indulgence and
conformity. It is our business to obey the
Church, to apply her now specific commands:
We are to profit by exploitation as little as we
possibly can; to simplify our lives to the
farthest feasible degree; to practise detach-
ment, and consecration, in the interior life of
the soul. But we must tread warily lest we

Introduction 35

tread on hearts; and in seeking the far vision
we may not neglect the primary tendernesses
which also are of God.

But just as the old line of escape from sin
grows more obscure, new lines are opening.
The day is to the common life, the common
effort. What we are not able to do as in-
dividuals, we may do all together, or through
group-action. To use a homely simile, many
Christians find themselves caught on the
branches of a great tree, the tree of privilege.
They do not quite know how to climb down,
but they have the axe of the law in their
hands, and they can apply themselves to saw-
ing off the branch they sit on. No less than
this, probably, is demanded of them by their
religion, and it is consoling to reflect that,
though a tumble may hurt, the ground is a
good place after all.

Suppose all Church members brought their
allegiance in great groups to movements which
aim at restoring land and other wealth on
equal terms to all men, and at placing the
control of production in part at least in the
hands of the producers. It is a startling hy-
pothesis, but it is not inconceivable. Already

36 The Church and the Hour

it is happening in a measure. The Kingdom
of God Cometh not with observation, and it
will never be possible to estimate the direct
share of Christian idealism in recent progress
toward industrial democracy. But the hour
has come to increase that share dramatically
and visibly. The sight of Christendom has
surely braced and sobered Christian thought.
If we are to avoid such catastrophe as has
fallen on our neighbors, we must immediately
apply Christianity to life, we must try to re-
store justice in America at the roots of things.
Our prosperity, won at such fearful cost to
other nations, gives us such chance at expia-
tion and at social experiment as we have
never had before ; and the distinctive contribu-
tion of religion to the modem crisis is to
encourage its more prosperous disciples to
ally themselves with the tendencies which will
impoverish them and handicap their power.
In spite of all discouraging facts, which the
following papers clearly recognize, the Church
is beginning to say brave words. It is for her
members to seal them with brave deeds.

Introduction 37

IV

If in these papers the note of criticism
sounds harsh at times, let it not be the last
to linger on the ear. Not for a moment can a
child of the Church forget the faithfulness of
the "Mighty Mother" in fulfilling her primary-
duty. That duty is to keep open the channel
between the temporal and the Eternal, through
sacraments, through the Word of God, through
all those disciplines of the interior life sanctified
by the experience of questing generations. Un-
nimibered souls fed at her iVltars day by day
by the Bread of Pilgrims, will attest that she
is true to her charge. To ignore this secret
sacred work, to throw it into the background
while impatient stress is put wholly on Church
responsibility for solving social problems,
would be to join the forces of Anti-Christ.
The enduring task and glory of the Church
is to foster in man the consciousness of God
and to help him to union with his Maker.

But salvation, which is health and whole-
ness, can be won by no man alone. Social ac-
tion becomes the swift correlative of spiritual
vision. The regenerate man is the citizen of

38 The Church and the Hour

that Kingdom of Justice which is the Kingdom
of God. And as perpetual intercession rises
in the words of the Lord's own prayer, for the
coming of this kingdom on earth, our social
passion becomes, as it were, incorporated with
our very conception of God. For He whom we
adore is God on the Rood of the world. It is
the God involved in the process of time, in
the flux of mortal history: the God defeated,
crucified. Whom we, by His mysterious will
must aid if He is to come to His own. Our
hands, alas, have nailed Him to that cross;
without our help He cannot, because He will
not, descend from it ; and to aid Him we must
climb to His side. Always men try to evade,
to find ways of consecrating life without
sacrificing it. And always, in measure as
they are near to Christ, they fail. By the
cross ^'the world is crucified imto me, and
I unto the world.'' If the phrase is to re-
gain a lost reality, it must be translated into
social terms. The "world" to which it refers,
to which it bids us be crucified, must be the
world of the banker, of the merchant; of the
solid business men who are the support of
parishes; of the ladies from the leisure class

Introduction 39

who carry on the work of the Church. Love,
seeking to save, saving if need be by dying,
must be the inward law, expressed in outward
life, related to actual present conditions, of
every soul in-oned with Christ in the work
of world-redemption.

In proportion as the Church can show how
such sacrificial love can manifest itself through
the present industrial and political situation,
she will furnish the moral and spiritual leader-
ship for the lack of which modern radicalism
despises her, and the absence of which in that
very radicalism makes the radical movement,
to a Christian, superficial and suspect. ^

THE ALLEGED FAILURE OF THE
CHURCH TO MEET THE SOCIAL
EMERGENCY^

(a paper read at the church congress held in

NORFOLK, VA., MAY, I916)

Be it said at the outset that the title of
this paper is not of my choosing. I should
have left out the word ''alleged.'*

The failure of the Church seems patent
to-day when one looks at the spectacle of the
world. Over in Europe, they say, many
crosses have been spared in the general de-
vastation,— so strangely spared that whispers
of miracle pass about. On the roads over
which move grim processions marching to
kill, sad processions retreating to suffer, the
Christ looks down:

» Reprinted from The Yale Review, January, 191 7.
40

The Church and the Hour 41

"His sad face on the Cross sees only this,
After the passion of two thousand years.'*

Sometimes the figure stands unscathed when
the Church that sheltered it is a ruin. Here
is such a picture:

''All that is left of the building is a few
white arches. Leaning forward from what re-
mains of the wall at one end is a pale Figure,
with arms widely extended, a wreath of
thorns on its head. Shells have smashed
away from it the wooden cross to which the
arms were nailed ; they seem now opened wide
in a gesture of entreaty. . . . One must
admit the ironic contrast of a Christ un-
scathed in a shattered Church. The per-
sistence of the Figure, the dissolution of the
fabric! The Church is man's interpretation
of Christianity: but the Church has disap-
peared in this war of Christians; the Christ
remains."

So the onlooker, expressing a widely spread
attitude. And what can those say to whom
the Church is infinitely more than ''man's
interpretation of Christianity"? To them
also, are not these Calvaries looking down on

42 The Church and the Hour

battle-fields a tragic symbol, not of war only
but of the civilized world?

If these years teach anything new, it is
that civilization per se has little especially
admirable about it. Civilization is no end
in itself, as men have assumed it to be; it is
merely an instrument, to be turned to use
either by the forces of evil or by the forces
of good. Have the forces of good, led by
the churches, yet captured it? The answer,
No, rises confused but unmistakable; the war
has brought into terrible relief the persistent
fact, that the Church, divided, hesitant,
backward, has apparently no contribution
to make, as an official body, either toward
the healing of the nations or toward the
healing of social disorders.

In Europe, churches are in use as observa-
tion-posts ; they serve as shelter to the wounded
or the homeless; from time to time the One
Sacrifice is pleaded piteously from their
ruined altars. But in collective effort to
prevent the horror or to end it, the Church
has been helpless. In effort to de-Paganize
industrial and social life, is she not equally
helpless the world over? Despite the frequent

The Church and the Hour 43

facile assumption that Christianity has under-
gone a great social revival, the reply must
be, Yes. Religion has consoled the bereaved,
it has strengthened the dying, it has established
vast works of philanthropy ; but for any states-
manlike attempt to evolve justice between
nations or classes by the application of the
law of Christ, men have looked to it in vain.

Last December I saw a strange Christmas
tree. It was in the home of a German friend,
whose tree is usually lovely with the radiant
symbols of the Christ-Child. This year, no
star, no angel, graced the summit; there was
no manger at the base, with adoring shep-
herds and sweet Mother-Maid. The tradi-
tional eagle of Odin spread his wings on the
topmost twig, and the snake, whom our
Northern forefathers saw at the roots of the
world-tree Ygdrasil, coiled with red tongue
poisonously stuck out, high among the
branches. ''The tree has always belonged
to the snake; it was a mistake to suppose
that the Christ-Child had killed him," said
my friend bitterly.

No, let us not say "alleged." ''Alleged"
has a defiant note. It calls for an apologia.

44 The Church and the Hour

a rebuttal. But in this year of grace,—
and sin — excuse is no attitude for the Church
or her children. Corporate penitence be-
hooves us rather. We belong on our knees
confessing our wrong-doing, not on our feet
defending ourselves.

II

The normal tissue of our national life has
obviously not been woven by Christianity.
Our economic and industrial order is the nat-
ural outgrowth of forces with which religion
has had nothing whatever to do. Many of
these forces are to-day generally regarded as
obsolescent; and the indictment against the
Church is that she does nothing in particular
to hasten their disappearance.

It is an indictment hard to disprove, but
not particularly hard to explain. Though
Christians be penitent, they must also regard
the situation with common sense, and rec-
ognize the fallacy that mingles with truth
in radical attacks on the Church.

These attacks habitually speak of the Church
as if she were a separate body, responsible for

The Church and the Hour 45

converting State and society. The truth is
more subtle. The Church is not a separate
body, it is an interpenetrating force. The
baptized individuals who compose it are to a
large degree the same who compose State and
society, and the Church in her corporate
action can never take a stand which her
members in their other capacities would
repudiate.

Suppose five people constitute the Church
in a certain village. Henry is a mill-owner,
Patrick a hand in his factory, Mary is Pat-
rick's wife, John a clerk in the bank, Kate is
John's daughter, married to a stockholder in
Henry's mill. Problem: to gain from these
people a corporate mind concerning the wage-
scale in that mill. One other person must be
added: Peter, the parson. Now there is
much to be said in favor of an old custom by
which the Church in that community meant
just Peter and nobody else. That custom,
however, is obsolete among us; and regret is
less, because it was partly based on the assump-
tion that Peter was a perfectly disinterested
person as well as a specialist in morals. Un-
fortunately, Peter's social relations are mainly

46 The Church and the Hour

with Henry and his family; moreover, he
derives his subsistence from Henry. I believe
this fact does not always prejudice him, but
it does make his situation difficult, especially
as he uses most of his salary to educate some
heathen in the far Black Country.

And the community expects the Cbarch to
solve the labor-problem!

Now of course a large share of responsibility,
though not the whole, does devolve on Peter.
The clergy must guide us. But the point is
that the business of the Church, as repre-
sented by Peter and his flock, is not to work
from outside on a recalcitrant world, but to
accomplish the far more difficult task of
converting itself, — a task so difficult that it
would never be accomplished save by the aid
of supernatural grace.

In this interpenetration of Church and
world, the reason is found for that lagging
timidity which keeps the Church as an institu-
tion in the rear rather than in the van of social
progress. We shall never again see a Church
dictating terms to the secular world, unless
we return to the discarded method of trusting
her decisions to a hierarchy instead of to the

The Church and the Hour 47

whole body of the faithful; and that was
not a particularly successful method, for ever
since the Gift of Constantine, clergy as well
as laity have remained a part of the very
order which they would transform. It would
therefore seem hopeless to expect from the
Church a standard immeasurably ahead of her
time. The positions she takes can hardly be
quite out of reach of the common mind, for
the common mind has dictated them.

How disparate the elements are which com-
pose this mind is evident as soon as any
common action is sought. To prove the slow
growth of the social sense it is only necessary
to try praying together without falling back
on liturgies. Union in prayer must surely
precede imion in action; but in any praying
group concerned with the social situation,
each member will try to press his own specific,
and the formulas may tend ludicrously to
neutralize each other. Here is a petition
that the socialist party may gain votes, here
one for the suppression of socialism; here
pleads a suffragist, here an anti. And pre-
paredness! What a Babel of voices, all
perfectly good Christian voices, has been

48 The Church and the Hour

buzzing of late around the Throne! That
they all may be One, prayed Our Blessed
Lord ; but He never meant one in opinion.

Ill

Yet when the very utmost is allowed for
contradictions in Christian thought, when
inclusiveness is pushed to the limit, it will be
found that there is a region below opinion,
deeper than dissent. In certain basic social
principles unity must obtain, otherwise the
Church must simply cease to be. These
principles are so plain that, once stated. Chris-
tians have no option. They are indissolubly
related to the peculiar treasures which the
Church exists to guard. Who, nurtured on
the Sacrament of Brotherhood, can stay
contented with our present social order when
once eyes have been opened? Who can really
read the Gospels and fail to find them a
disturbing force? In the intimacies of Chris-
tian experience, in the very sanctuary of
faith, men seeking to learn the mind of Christ
discover over and over the revolutionary
nature of true discipleship :

The Church and the Hour 49

'' Where'er His chariot takes its way
The gates of death let in the day."

This has always been the case. However
conservative the Church has been in her
corporate and official capacity, radicals in all
ages have been nursed at her breasts. But it is
more the case to-day than at any previous
time since the first century; for modern
Christendom has awakened with a start of
recognition to the historic purpose of her
Master, — the establishment of the Kingdom
of God on earth. This means the moralizing
of life in its ultimate practical relations.
Through the roar of battle and of factory,
the Master's summoning Voice sounds stem.

Moreover, while the Church has lagged
behind, great lay movements of unrest and
of reconstruction have arisen and clamor for
allegiance. She has not originated these
movements; we must accept the fact that
her official spirit cannot be adventurous.
But when other adventurers have blazed the
trail, she will be eternally disgraced if she
does not follow.

Discrimination is necessary. There are

50 The Church and the Hour

phases in these movements on which she can
have no convictions. To measures Hke suf-
frage or anti-suffrage, to theories Hke sociaHsm
or syndicalism or single-tax, the Church can-
not commit herself, though her members will
naturally use their Christian ideals as a
touchstone for all such propositions. There
are other phases where her inaction would be
a scandal and a crime. Perhaps the type of
social reforms which Christianity must en-
dorse, or perish, might be described by the
phrase, ''preliminaries to sanctification." It is
an awkward phrase; but it obviously covers
all measures aiming directly at the preserva-
tion of personality; it would apply to move-
ments, legislative or private, demanding social
sacrifice and self-control. It would include
every statement in the admirable program
of the Federation of Churches.^

Many points in this program deal with
industrial conditions, and with these, sanc-
tification may at first sight appear to have
little to do. But a moment's thought shows
that it has a great deal. The Church, like
her Master, is in a v/ay more concerned over
the spiritual state of the prosperous than over

» See p. 7 ff.

The Church and the Hour 51

that of the poor, and her anxiety about social
justice springs largely from the fact that
so long as the rich and fortunate countenance
unbrotherly things, sanctification is impossible
for them. It may be good for the soul of
Patrick to subsist on a starvation wage, but
it is very bad for the soul of Henry the mill-
owner to pay him that wage. It is spiritual
suicide for the possessors of privileges to
rest, until such privileges become the common
lot. This truth is what the Church should
hold relentlessly before men's eyes; it is what
makes indifference to social readjustments
impossible to her shepherding love.

One does not see the sanctified man, for
instance, defending his property rights with
passion. A proposal has been made in a
report of the Industrial Relations Commission
that private bequests be limited to a million
dollars. This is a reasonable and moderate
proposal. It does not attack private pro-
perty, but merely limits it at a point far
above what most people reach, and no Chris-
tian mind would surely stoop to the meanness
of claiming that it would unduly lessen
incentive. It would deliver many men from

52 The Church and the Hour

fearful temptations, — a result for which we
are told to pray. Incidentally, non-Christian
moralists are pleading for self-limitation in
wealth as the next step in the higher ethics.
Now in view of Christ's persistent feeling
that it is dangerous to be rich, — a feeling
that no subtle exegesis has ever succeeded
in explaining away, — one might have expected
to see His disciples, His Church, eagerly wel-
come the plan and press it with enthusiasm.
Did one see this spectacle? One did not.

Again, no Christian can remain indifferent
or non-partisan toward movements for the
protection of the weak. If the Church really
possessed that homely family sense so touch-
ingly expressed in the collect for Good Friday,
most social problems would be solved. It
may be materialistic to object to external
poverty and sordidness ; but no one has a right
to say so unless he is prepared to welcome
such conditions for his own relatives. It
may be superficial to look to legislation as a
cure for social evils; but the people who
think so must be prepared with other cures.
They must not be permitted to fall back on
charity, whether ''scrimped and iced" or

The Church and the Hour 53

warm and efficient; that solution is far out-
grown. Neither may they dismiss the subject
with the sententious remark that the one thing
necessary is a change of heart. Necessary?
Certainly! Change of heart is the beginning,
it is not the end. Changed hearts all around,
by hundreds and by thousands, are trying
to express their conversion in social action.
Has the Church no guidance to give to hearts
when they have been changed?

If such matters as those indicated have
nothing to do with the Church, then the
Church has nothing to do with righteousness.
The hour has come for Christian thought to
give definite sanction to the new social ethic
that has been developing for the last half
century. The check by common will on
private greed, the care for public health, the
protection of childhood and manhood, the
securing of fair leisure from the monotonies of
modem labor, form a program hardly to be
called radical any longer. It is accredited by
all the progressive forces of the community,
it forms the backgroimd of respectable modem
thinking. But it has not yet emerged into
respectable doing. That is another matter;

54 The Church and the Hour

involving effort and sacrifice. Is not this
just where the Church might come in? She
has missed the cliance at initiative ; the chance
of performance remains with her.

Let us not for a moment tolerate the con-
temptuous excuse for her too frequent silence,
proffered by the radicals, — that her resources
come from the sinners. Perhaps there are
no sinners; perhaps there are only good men,
blind. But assuredly they are very blind,
Is the Church habitually giving them help
to see? Is Church membership a guarantee
that in time of stress a man will act on a higher
level than mere business honor? A group
of manufacturers fights organized labor, only
to acknowledge, when the strike is won, that
a rise was well warranted by the profits.
Confronted by this disgraceful sight, does any
one think to enquire how many of these
employers were Church-members?

The standards of the Church in this matter
of social morality should be no niggling mini-
mimi. They should be bold and explicit.
She should make every Christian woman
ashamed of herself so long as she neglects to
secure a cleaner conscience by buying Con-

The Church and the Hour 55

simier's League goods. She should make
every Christian man ashamed of himself, so
long as he is unable or unwilling to pay a
living wage to his least employee. She should
bid dividend holders be prepared to suffer
rather than to profit by the exploitation of
the laborer. Shrunken dividends can cause
much distress, but as a class, by and large, the
dividend holders are better off than the wage-
earners. Poorest first is Christian law. Just
wages should be the first consideration, rea-
sonable dividends the second, personal profits
for the directors the last. To reverse the
order is usual nowadays; but it is Pagan.

And is it too much to hope that where a
moral issue is plain, the Church might even
occasionally get a little ahead of the com-
munity conscience, instead of always lagging
a little in the rear?

Concerning that matter of dividends, for
example. There is a growing healthy touchi-
ness everywhere about the sources of wealth.
In England feeble protests even arise, — oh,
the shame of it! — against bishops' holding
shares in breweries. As social imagination
quickens, it becomes harder to accept income

56 The Church and the Hour

without knowing what that income connotes.
Some radicals, to be sure, do not beheve in
the principles of interest at all ; and it does no
harm to dream of a day when the complex
system involving it will be replaced by a more
direct relation between services and rewards,
class distinctions vanishing in consequence.
But in the meantime many people must
continue to live on the proceeds from stocks
and bonds; and it is reasonable to wish to
be sure that the money has not been gathered
at the cost of cruelty or graft.

To profit by conditions which leave one
uneasy is demoralizing and dangerous. A
quarter century ago, much uneasiness concen-
trated itself among women upon the morale of
buying; to meet it arose the Consumers*
League. To-day the Christian stockholders
of the United States begin to demand a White
List of investments. Such a list if heeded
would introduce a new principle into investing,
quite apart from the size or security of the
dividend. It would be a terrible nuisance.
It would call for real sacrifice. Dozens of
cogent reasons prove it impossible. In famous
words, I am not concerned with the possibility

The Church and the Hour 57

of it, — only with the necessity. Perhaps it
cannot be done, but that is a serious conclu-
sion to reach. For the only Christian alter-
native to moralizing the present order is to
abolish it, and if the Church cannot accomplish
the first alternative, she must address herself
with all speed to the second — which spells
revolution.

Obviously, the Church is not herself com-
petent to draw up such a white list of in-
vestments. Only trained experts could carry
through so delicate, so intensely difficult a
task. But I submit that it is for her to crys-
tallize and encourage the new demand in the
name of the torn consciences of her children.
Through pulpits, forums, Sunday-schools,
guilds, conferences, she can hold it clear
before the public eye. Organized groups of
Christian stockholders, studying the problem,
feeling their way toward concerted action,
rise before the fancy. And why could not
the Church appoint her own commission of
experts? She raises great funds: funds for
philanthropy, for missions, for the relief of her
aged clergy. Why not a fund to render her
more fortunate children secure that their

$8 The Church and the Hour

income is not drawn from Sirnday labor, child-
labor, or any unfair exploitation of the workers?
The mere existence of such a commission
would give her new status among reformers
and among those alienated from her. It would
serve as a visible witness that organized
Christianity was in earnest. It would more-
over tend automatically to establish the
standard it approved, for it would offer strong
moral support to the many in the younger
generation of employers and financiers whose
hearts are set on the improvement of industrial
conditions.

IV

Schemes are easy to propose. This one
calls for limitless wisdom, intelligence, tact, and
pluck. And all the while the smooth voices
of the world proclaim the status quo so pleas-
ant,— and insinuate so plausibly that questions
of this sort are irrelevant to religion!

The world has always taken the same line.
The Church used to solve the problem of
standards more easily in some ways than she
can now. Formerly as always she worked in
two fashions, — by permeating the ideals of

The Church and the Hour 59

society, and by contradicting them. A level
of conduct slightly higher than if there had
been no Church at all was accepted without
qualms for the majority; but severe Coimsels
of Perfection shone aloft, luring the valiant
to follow. And follow they did in throngs, —
Regulars, Third Orders, Confraternities, — the
chivalry of Christ, aiming at literal obedience
to Him, vowed to conduct that contradicted
at vital points the standards around them.
We are all for permeation nowadays, and
perhaps, — though the claim is timid, — religion
really permeates a little more than it did.
But there would be difficulty in reasserting
the counsels. Mixing up mediocrity with
democracy in our usual way, we have grown
insensibly to such feeling for the common
man that we distrust demands which he is not
likely to approve. Also, the asceticism which
held that holiness must repudiate life has
yielded to enthusiasm for life in its fullness.
These instincts are in their way creditable
enough; but they result in a slackening of
Christian ethics. As the Bishop of Oxford
said years ago, religion suffers from diffusion
at the cost of intensity.

6o The Church and the Hour

What accredited type of piety did the
United States inherit from the last century?
Suave-mannered, pleasant-voiced; endanger-
ing nothing in particular, an ornament to the
Sunday pews; devoted to good causes in
proportion to their remoteness, intent on
promoting safe philanthropies and foreign
missions, but, so far as home affairs are con-
cerned, ignorant alike of the ardors of the
mystic and the heroisms of the reformer. A
queer type of Christianity if one thinks of it,
— cheerfully assuming that what is innocently
agreeable is religious. Agonies of the social
conscience deprecated in the name of spiritual-
ity, agonies of the inward life yet more depre-
cated in the name of sanity. No agonies at
all, if you please: careless dependence rather
on an affectionate God, confusedly mixed
with a sentimental love of scenery. Parents
more concerned with hygiene than with salva-
tion for their offspring; sacrifice relegated to
the foreign field, or to underpaid social
workers. A domestic religion, mid- Victorian
in effect, calculated to make life pleasant in
the family circle, — but curiously at ease in
Zion.

The Church and the Hour 6i

That was about what Christianity meant in
many a home three years ago.

Then came the war, with its appeal for
devotion to the uttermost; and the peoples of
Europe responded with a sort of sacred joy.
They obey the call of governments to destroy
fellow-men at any personal cost in the name of
patriotism; and their readiness puts to shame
the failure of the Church to enlist them for the
protection of manhood, in the holier Name of
Christ.

The excuse for the contrast is of course
that men will always be ready to defend ancient
sanctities; it requires imagination as well as
courage to break new ways for Love to enter.
Yet how tempting to picture a new crusade,
that should win for Christ the whole sphere
of social and industrial relations! Here is
the Adventure of the waiting world; and the
Church should call men to it with a trumpet.

In the great strange years to come, will she
call them ; will she guide them? On the answer
lies the salvation of civilized life. Battle-
smoke overhangs those years: it drifts across
the narrow seas, so blinding that we in America
cannot discern our future. But this is sure,

62 The Church and the Hour

that after the war old evils will be fiercer than
ever, while aspirations toward righteousness
also will be fired with a new intensity. Reali-
ties become masked with the advance of
civilization. Many masks have fallen now,
many conventions are destroyed. The social
order is seen stark naked: it is not a lovely
sight. In passing, one may notice that the
convulsion which has stripped himianity, was
not caused by the radical forces once so
dreaded, but, one is almost tempted to say,
by the Devil himself, masquerading as gentle-
man, patriot, and diplomatist. In the hideous
glare of the firing, it is possible to see Mars
and Mammon, twin supporters of the old
Capitalistic order, rushing on their own
destruction.

This is the hour of opportimity; this is the
hour of the Church. In the last fifty years
she has accomplished a great preparation, by
her rediscovery of the purpose of Jesus. Few
and hesitant, however, have been her attempts
to realize that purpose, to strive boldly,
through profound labors of readjustment and
reconstruction, to establish the Kingdom of
God, the kingdom of love, on earth. Perhaps

The Church and the Hour 63

one cause of her semi-paralysis has been her
failure to recognize that the central incident
in the process of estabHshing the kingdom
must always be a Cross.

If civiUzation, with its science, its culture,
its thousand graces of heart and mind, is not
to be abandoned to the powers of evil, the
revolutionary principle of love must be ac-
cepted as the practical basis for all human
relations, industrial and national. ^

But, for the Christian, what a tremendous

IF!

The central question will not down: Has
religion anything to do with civihzation?
Perhaps the age is sweeping to catastrophic
end,— and in that case the true aim of the
Christian is not to transform the social order,
but to transcend it. So thought the Early
Church: her Christianity was largely^ un-
interested in secular affairs, and her disciples,
adopting an ad interim policy toward the
evil world from which they had been saved,
awaited, patient, humble, the coming of the

64 The Church and the Hour

Son of Man. "Even so, come, Lord Jesus!"
That last prayer of the Scripture canon is
still the final prayer on Christian lips; and
still the echo of the Lord's own question stings
the heart: When the Son of ]\Ian cometh,
shall He find faith on the earth?

Trust in progress has received a shock of
late. But even before the war, a strong cur-
rent in the religious world was considering it
an illusion, and setting toward those Apoca-
lyptic hopes always accompanied with other-
worldly fatalism. Books like Hugh Benson's
Lord of the World, and the Russian Solovyof 's
brilliant War Progress and the End of History y
expressed the curious idea that the modern
humanitarian movement, if it were not Anti-
Christ himself, was at least a preparation
for Anti-Christ; talk concerning the Second
Advent was revived in unexpected quarters,
and naysticism, with its stress on the interior
life as the only matter of importance, entered
its ancient claim in new and lovely forms.

Perhaps few people hold explicitly the be-
lief in an apocalyptic as opposed to a social
type of Christianity. But this is the extreme
of an instinctive reaction. While social Chris-

The Church and the Hour 65

tianity, weak and young, reaches out pleading
arms for help, suspicion of it has set in. Grow-
ing opposition threatens between two Christian
schools, one humanitarian, philanthropic, even
socialistic, stressing the establishment of the
Kingdom of God on earth; the other mystic,
individualistic, intent exclusively on the devel-
opment of spiritual faculty, on the release of
eternity in Time. This last school, I suppose,
would not oppose temporal works of mercy
when they clamored to be done; but it would
take slight interest in attacking those hidden
wrongs basic to the present social order.
No white list of investments needed for its
followers !

Something in most of us shares the distaste
for social Christianity. And no wonder.
Cant about social service fills the air. The
complacent yoimg make it an excuse for the
neglect of penitence and devotion. The hun-
gry sheep leave Church, swollen less often
with theological wind than in Milton's day,
but with sociological chaff, which is no more
nourishing. Earnest people go to Church
very wistful, and what they crave from
Christian preaching is not instruction about

66 The Church and the Hour

reforms. They want release for the frozen
springs of will and feeling, power imparted to
open the soul to the inflowing Grace of God.
Too often, the modem pulpit evades their
need. Too often, the modem Church seems
like a great machine for the cheery promotion
of social welfare, and it is natural enough if
the charge is made that social service, and
care for social justice, is simply that clever
old enemy materialism, invading the sanctities
in new disguise.

Personally, I believe that there is one way
only of avoiding the menacing division be-
tween spiritual and social Christianity. I
believe that the reproach of unspirituality,
so often and so justly cast on social religion,
is mainly due to the frequent divorce between
social enthusiasm and Christian dogma; and
that the special power of the Church to meet
the social emergency depends on the presence
within her of a large group to whom the two
aspects of her heritage are alike precious and
essential, and who draw their social radicalism
from the Catholic faith in its wholeness.

The great movement of social reform and
revolution will go on, as it began, quite in-

The Church and the Hour 67

dependently of Christian people. But if the
Christian will has a distinctive contribution
to make, such a contribution must spring
from the distinctive Christian convictions.
Reform, revolution, have for the Christian
one supreme aim, — the general release of
human power, so that men may more truly
know God and enjoy Him torever. This is
the end of all our ** preliminaries to sanctifica-
tion. " Unless a man know within himself
this supreme aim, how can he rightly further
it for others? And what is the Catholic
faith, except the ultimate means for attaining
the knowledge of God verified by the Christian
experience of the ages?

This attitude is unpopular, and it is cur-
rently assimied that revolt from dogma and zeal
for social reform are mysteriously connected.
Significant books illustrate this thesis ; brilliant
men defend it. It is a plausible thesis, for the
alHance is natural and common. All instincts
of revolt sympathize while they are immature,
and reaction against the accredited in religion
and in society is likely to make a simultaneous
appeal to the mind. Yet treacherous acci-
dents of time or origin can bring into temporary

68 The Church and the Hour

alliance movements either unrelated or op-
posed. Commimism, for instance, to many
among its disciples and its critics alike, implies
hostility to marriage. But the basis of sex
relations and property relations is quite di-
verse, and there is no earthly reason why
commtmity in goods should imply community
in wives. Nor is there any reason either
earthly or heavenly, why disbelief in the
Virgin-Birth or the Trinity should predispose
a man to oppose vested interests or sweat-
shops.

The modem churches are full of people
who find dogma a clog to the free spirit,
and who concern themselves with it as little
as may be. Let them stay, and work for
righteousness. But let them recognize the
value of the other school, who apprehend
Christianity less as ethical program than as
spiritual power, and whose firm faith in
Catholic doctrine is the well-spring of revo-
lutionary conviction. There is intimate
imion, known to many who shrink from
speaking of these arcana, between the Catholic
faith at its fullest and social radicalism at its
boldest. Strength comes to these, not from

The Church and the Hour 69

such generalized religious ideals as can be
shared by Buddhist or Jew, but from the
definite Gospel as interpreted by the historic
Church. They leave the religion of Humanity
to those without the churches, for they know
a better thing, — the religion of Christ.

Religious fervor, as the past proves, is
attended by a vicious danger of spiritual
egotism, unless it lead to social action. But
plain Christians generally know to-day, as
they have always known, that for them social
action is in the long run unmotived and
perilous unless it draw from deep wells of
religious faith.

VI

And if any say, as they will, that dogma
is a dead thing, irrelevant to these reflections
and to the love of God, let them remember
that most Christian doctrines are simply
experience taken at white heat and crystal-
lized. Because experience is concerned with
relationships, the richest social implications
may be drawn from all the great theological
concepts of the Church. For instance: to

70 The Church and the Hour

casual surface thinking, nothing seems more
remote from daily life or more repellent
than the more recondite phases of the doctrine
of the Atonement. Yet nowhere can heroism
be more truly quickened, nowhere can modem
ethic be more severely rebuked, than in
contemplating the amazing depths of love
which the Church sttmiblingly tries to describe
in that doctrine. Jealousy for the welfare
of one's children is a central point in this
ethic of ours: to protect them is a cardinal
duty, and a far stronger deterrent from
radical change than personal ambition or
fear; many and many a man would risk all
for himself who will risk nothing for his child.
Yet the Beloved Son, begotten before all
worlds, is sent forth by the Father to suffer
even unto death for the world's salvation;
thus are our timidities put to shame; and
the worshiper, contemplating the Atonement
from the point of view not of man but of the
Fount of Godhead, learns readiness to sacrifice
not only himself, which is easy, but his children,
which is hard.

Only by cherishing the tremendous impetus
to bold social action to be found in the

The Church and the Hour 71

mystical depths of dogma can the modem
social movement be rescued from the half-
deserved reproach of putting the body above
the soul, and losing sight of the eternal in
the things of time. And many believe that
only by drawing from this source can the
movement gain permanent force to withstand
the fierce passions of the lower nature, and to
create the new era in which the impossible
paradox shall be realized, righteousness and
peace kissing each other, and mercy and truth
meeting as lovers at last.

And in proportion as we draw from such
source of strength, perhaps the question
concerning the reality of himian progress will
cease so actively to distress us, — though we
may be no more able to give a categorical
answer to it than our Master was. It is
clear that in the mind of Jesus, as in history,
two principles were recognized about the
Coming of the Kingdom: growth and catas-
trophe. When His Church loses thought of
catastrophe, and devotes herself comfortably
— and half-heartedly — to furthering growth,
omens of future judgment are likely to gather,
as they are gathering now. We shall do well

72 The Church and the Hour

if, obeying Christ's indubitable teachings, we
join to our steadfast efforts to promote the
cause of the Kingdom on earth, the awestruck
readiness for sudden judgment. Of that day
and that hour knoweth no man, and the
kingdom cometh not with observation; but
it is sure to come. And we are to remember
that in the New Testament judgment is the
goal of hope, the beginning and not the end;
since it ushers in that millennium which is no
heavenly mirage, but the Christian Utopia,
the destined heritage of fleshly men.

Meantime let us not soothe our slothful
wills because Our Lord delayeth His Coming.
Nothing is clearer than that Christ condemns
inactivity. We must increase our talents,
we must tend our lamps, we must work in the
vineyard as if the harvest time were sure.
To the prayer. Thy Kingdom come on earth,
which carries with it so certain a promise
of fulfilment, must be joined that other last
prayer Vv^ithout which the heart would fail
indeed: Eve7i so come, Lord Jesus, It is the
supreme test of faith to live in uncertainty,
and to that test our age is called. This means
that in a peculiar sense, inward and mystic

The Church and the Hour 73

as well as practical, it must embrace the
heroic aspects of the Cross.

The world has never been so conscious of
Christ as in these days of horror. Cartoons
show Him everywhere. The hand of the dead
soldier rests on His wounded Feet ; the sorrow-
ing wife feels His consoling Presence. Kaiser
and King turn their backs on Him or pierce
Him with the bayonet. To His gray figure
on the Cross, touched with dawn in the
mists that rise from the profounds of mountain
chasms, climb bowed processions of phantom
mourners, chanting in all the tongues of the
warring nations to Him Who is their Peace.
Meantime, those actual Calvaries that stand
so grave and still, watching the battle-fields,
bring a message of hope rather than despair.
Though the walls of the Church seem shattered,
and though no rest be found for the seeking
soul in its ruins, it cannot perish so long as
Christ abides. For His presence creates it,
and that presence, manifest on its Altars,
shall never leave the world He died to save.

THE CHURCH'S OPPORTUNITY

The Christian Church, especially in Anglo-
Saxon countries, is awakening to an extra-
ordinary paradox in its position. This is
not a new paradox ; but never before was it so
marked as in our day. It relates to the social
quality of Church membership. The dis-
inherited and the humble were the first to
profess the faith, and the formula of that
faith are theirs. The prosperous are those
who now profess it, and the formulae are
strange upon their lips.

At the time of the first Christmas, the poor,
the slaves, the oppressed, were craving a
Deliverer, throughout that Roman Empire on
whose upper circles ''disgust and secret long-
ing" had fallen. The sense of sin, growing
curiously deep just then, blended with a
confused resentment against injustice at the
roots of things; the quickened personal life
shared by the proletariat with the rest of the

74

The Church and the Hour 75

world, htingered for some aid to self-respect.
How fully Christianity met these needs —
Christianity, with its story of a Carpenter,
despised and rejected, executed as an agita-
tor, victor over death. Saviour from sins, who
washed men in His blood and made them
kings and priests before God! The new
hope was bom among workingmen. Secretly,
swiftly, it spread through the Roman under-
world, though an occasional ''intellectual" as
we might now say, rose to leadership in the
movement. It swept through Asia Minor
westward to the center of empire, thence out
to farthest barbarian bounds. Many edu-
cated and prosperous people were before long
touched by the rapture which so strangely
blotted out worldly distinctions; yet in the
main the faith percolated up from below,
bearing the clear stamp of a proletarian
religion. God had put down the mighty
and exalted the humble. He had filled the
hungry, while the rich were sent empty away.
What though these marvels were achieved on
the spiritual rather than the natural plane?
All the more satisfying, all the more perma-
nent. Blessed were the poor, the meek,

76 The Church and the Hour

the hungry for justice; the dispossessed and
defeated Hfted their brows to heaven to catch
the Hght of a new morning, in which mihtary
valor, administrative power, intellectual acu-
men, slipped into shadow, and the radiance
fell on the servile virtues which Paganism
had scorned.

Of course the situation did not last long.
Christianity was too rare a discovery to be
left in the hearts of slaves. At first more
or less a class-conscious movement, it was
saved from being revolutionary also only
by its apocalyptic hope, and by the instinct
for non-resistance and obedience native to the
classes through which it spread. But from
the first it held the germs of a universal faith,
and it slipped from the control of the prole-
tariat as it had slipped from the control of the
Jews. Before long, we find it approved by
the authorities; and the Gift of Constantine,
("Ahi Costantin, di quant o mal fu matre!")
united an institutional Catholicism firmly
with the existing order. Fervent Christian
missionaries now aimed at the conversion
of princes, who, when converted, imposed
the new religion wholesale on their realms,

The Church and the Hour 77

and brought the armies of their adversaries
to baptism at the point of the sword.

These subject populations seem to have
been genuinely Christianized after a fashion.
We confront a mediaeval Europe which in a
sense deserves the name of Christendom ; how-
ever childishly the religion be conceived, it is at
least the common heritage. The feudal baron
and his least of villeins are fed from the same
altar and die with the same invocations on
their lips. The faith, Catholic in more than
name, encourages a spiritual democracy that
goes far to mitigate the harshness of class-
barriers, and to plant in race-consciousness,
however obscurely, the seed of brotherhood.
Through the middle ages, our paradox, how-
ever humorous, is innocent and imconscious.
Cheerily the followers of the Prince of Peace
go forth to war and live by the rule of might.
Archbishop Turpin gives his Franks for pen-
ance an order to ''fight their best"; Roland
in one breath invokes St. Michael, and bids
farewell to his sword, ''the fair and holy," —
prototypes these of endless warrior prelates
and most Christian, Catholic, and predatory
nobles, on whose lips the Gospel maxims

78 The Church and the Hour

soiind strange indeed. But men were simple
then. The fighting had to be done, the
authority to be maintained, and sunset years
in a monastery might always atone for a
vehement noon. Meanwhile, there were al-
ways the voiceless throngs of faithful, wistful
people — villeins, vagrants, poor folk of the
towns — to whom the vision of the city of
peace, where the humble should reign, brought
help and healing; men who cherished with
passionate devotion their glorious secret:
belief in the workman who had been cradled
in a bam, had lived a houseless man, and who
should be Judge and Overlord of all the great
of the earth. ''Our Prince Jesus poverty
chose, and His apostles twelve; and aye the
langer they lived the less goods they had."
Honor poor men, ''for in their likeness oft our
Lord hath been known. ' ' So said old Langland
patiently.

Do poor folk take like comfort to-day?
One doubts it; for Christianity to all appear-
ance, at least in Protestant countries, is
certainly no longer in any general sense a
proletarian religion. As we said at the out-
set it has largely passed into the hands of the
privileged.

The Church and the Hour 79

This is not to say in any sweeping absolute
fashion that the Christian reHgion is obhter-
ated among the lower classes. There is the
Salvation Army, there are slum churches
thronged at mass, there are many other honor-
able exceptions. Yet in the main it is difficult
to deny that those who support and value the
churches to-day are the comfortable middle
classes, while those who first received the good
tidings and spread it over the civilized world
would surprise us very much if they appeared
in the sanctuary. Fifty years and more ago,
Matthew Arnold pointed out the divorce of
the working people from religion as the most
sinister sign of the times. He hoped to win
them back by blotting out dogma in favor of
ethics; but it is not the working class that has
accepted his suave attenuations of the Gospel.
To picture the congregation in a popular
church, transformed into the sort of audience
to be seen at a socialist rally or a strikers'
meeting, is a startling flight of fancy. The
hungry and the meek no longer sing the
Magnificat. Respectable and relatively pros-
perous people fill the churches so far as they
are filled ; establish missions, guilds, and insti-

8o The Church and the Hour

tutional centers for the class to which they
owed their faith in the beginning; and worry
seriously over the ''lapsed masses."

Nor does one see any immediate prospect
of change in the curious situation. The
classes at the base of things suffer to-day
under sorrowful pressure of industrial anxiety.
Their members when gentle, have often too
little vitality for church-going, and when
spirited experience too sharp indignation at
the heart-root to enjoy peaceful religious
hope. General interest, among them, is largely
transferred from another world to this one;
a new religion, the dangerous rehgion of revolt,
spreads like silent flame among the working
classes. Eager in propaganda as the religion
of Paul was once, it lures, it quickens, it wakes
in dull eyes the light that Christianity no
longer kindles. We may mourn as we will.
We may analyze causes forever in the maga-
zines. In sincere distress over souls that
perish, we may multiply our missions; the
situation will persist. The people who most
loudly glorify submission and renunciation
belong to the class least called on to practice
these virtues; those who extol a homeless

The Church and the Hour 8r

Lord command fair homes where their children
gather in peace around them, while the land-
less and homeless have wandered far from Him,
and are seeking strange new guides.

What are we to learn from this situation?

No more extraordinary reversal was ever
seen than the change, socially speaking, of
the personnel of the Christian Church. There
is little use in fighting the situation directly.
There is less use in grieving over it. We shall
do better to consider its good points, for it
has them.

We may notice, for instance, that the
well-to-do and respectable need religion quite
as much as the proletariat — more, if we are to
trust Jesus when He says that they are in
peculiar spiritual peril. From this point of
view, it is a cheering fact that to thousands
of people in the prosperous classes religion is
perfectly genuine. Loyalty to the Churches,
does really foster in them the life of the soul,
however hard working-class agitators find it to
believe this. They break through into that
''world subsisting within itself," which, as
Eucken says, religion creates, and consciously

6

82 The Church and the Hour

submit their being to iits transforming and
saving power.

For over a century critics have been an-
nouncing that Christianity was at the point
of death; but never was it more aHve. We
hardly need such proofs as a Men and ReHgion
Forward Movement, a World's Student Chris-
tian Federation, a Conference on Faith and
Order. Countless confraternities and guilds,
Anglican orders revived, Roman orders
dispersed on the Continent only to plant
centers of influence in free Anglo-Saxondom,
show the vitality inherent in the more rigid
forms of faith; while a public that eagerly
absorbs Eucken and draws enormous ntimbers
of religious books from libraries, is surely
awake to spiritual things. Emphases have
changed. Ethics and sentiment interest more
than dogma. That benevolence of which
Christ said so little has become our central
social virtue, replacing that joy in poverty
and that spirit of renunciation for which He
pleaded. None the less the cry arises, "Thou
hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and restless
are our hearts until they rest in Thee.*'

So far so good; yet we all want to probe

The Church and the Hour 83

further. Our paradox must hold a summons.
For, to speak frank Christian language, if
God has thus shaped Christian history, it is
because He has thought it well so to do. The
situation at any point of time — to believe
this is the superb adventure of Christian faith
— is that precise situation from which everyone
involved may profit the most : it is that through
which the Kingdom of God may advance more
swiftly. The glory of every temptation,
every difficulty, is the opportimity it presents.

What is the opportunity, what the summons,
afforded in the dramatic transformation of
Christianixy from a religion of slaves to a reli-
gion of masters? The greatest we could ask. It
is the chance to demonstrate, with a imique
cogency, that Christianity is no mere natural
product, but a supernatural power. We can
rout for all time the economic determinist.
We can prove, as Eucken says once more, that
''reality has a depth beyond the natural man.'*

Early Christian history holds no such
demonstration for the modem caviller. He
points out that the new religion, with its
emphasis on servile virtues, took facile root
among a servile population. In the under-

84 The Church and the Hour

world of society a religion was bound to
flourish which lent the grace of dignity and
the light of spiritual romance to the qualities
of non-resistance, unworldliness, and meekness,
which the poor were in any case forced to
practice, and exalted into honor the ancient
badges of their shame. The early Christians
sacrificed little: their religion was a natural
product of their economic environment, as it
remains to this day a natural consolation
for the weak. Would you persuade us to
see in it an influx of grace from Above, show
it practiced by the strong !

Where do we so find it? W^here perceive
clear proof of the Christian ideal running
counter to the psychology engendered by
circumstance? One remembers interesting
individuals, down the centuries: a Francis
Bemardone, a Gordon, a Shaftesbury. They
arrest thought, one admits. But look at life
in the large! Christianity has been really
operative only with those groups or classes to
whom submission, obedience, are matters of
necessity: Russian peasants, if you will, or
Langland's poor folk, or women, before the
days of the suffragettes. It has been easy

The Church and the Hour 83

enough for the crushed to honor meekness, for
the suffering to console themselves by the
secret faith that pain redeems the world, for
people ''terrified by fears, cast down by
poverty" to praise poverty of spirit, and look
forward to a Vision of Peace beyond the
grave.

But let us see the powerful, for a change,
abjuring their power; the rich, giving poverty
more than lip-homage and patronage; the
happy, deliberately choosing to suffer with the
age-long hunger of the dispossessed, till they
win the blessing of them that mourn. Show
us a corporate Christianity which involves
social sacrifice on a large scale. If you show
that, you can bid us believe in anything, even
in baptismal regeneration.

What is this? You point to the hold
Christianity has on the prosperous classes?
To our large congregations, our great contribu-
tions to missions and philanthropy, our solemn
stress on ''social service," our magnates of
finance passing the contribution plate? —
And here it is to be feared that the caviller
pauses and shrugs. Amuse yourselves as you
like, he says. Try as you will to add to the

86 The Church and the Hour

assets of one order of things, the earthly,
the perquisites of another order, the heavenly;
reserve your Christian principles for private
consumption in the family circle, or treat
them as an affair of the heart, sentimentally
spiritual, unrelated to the way in which
you make or spend your income. Evade as
you choose the plain purport of your Master's
teaching of brotherhood. The religion you
profess may last your time, but it is as surely
dying out as the plants in His old story
withered from lack of soil. What we out-
siders need in order to convince us that you
Christians have indeed ''broken through into
reality'' is to see those who can command
luxury, choosing poverty so long as their
brothers want; those who might rule men,
industrially or politically, becoming true ser-
vants of the democracy. It is to find Chris-
tians voting in public matters steadily against
their own class-interests, and in private life
literally caring more to share than to own.
This spectacle, we grant, would be an effective
proof of a divine religion. But men are not
likely to see it.

No? But what if they did?

The Church and the Hour 87

Since the days of the martyrs, Christians
have had no chance to bear witness so saHent,
so inviting, to the reaHty of their faith. The
martyr is only the witness, though the con-
notations of pain that the word carries imply
that honest witness-bearing has always in-
volved cost. The test must be real. It was
real in the Early Church, and people met it:
nobles, of whom there was ever a fair sprinkling
among believers, as well as slaves, to whom
after all life was sweet. We may not have
the martyr-stuff in us to-day. The very
word has degenerated, till we speak. Heaven
forgive us, of a martyr to rheumatism or to
relatives! A martyr to us means a victim.
Now comes the chance to redeem the word,
to show that he is a hero. Reality endures.
The nature of the witness it requires varies
from age to age. These being the industrial
ages, witness to truth will naturally be related
to the industrial life; and it has strangely
and quietly come to pass that Christian people
are now chiefly drawn from the class which has
industrial sacrifice within its power to make.

Obvious economic sacrifice on the part of
Christians at large is the only soimd means

88 The Church and the Hour

to silence the reiterated sneer of the material-
istic radical who threatens our civilization. He
is honestly convinced that no solid gain in
justice or freedom has ever been carried through
with the support of those who had anything to
lose by it. Here is the slogan of the revolu-
tionary syndicalist, here the insidious assur-
ance through which he attracts the working
people by thousands to his religion of revolt.
He insists ad nauseam that every advance
in popular freedom has been wrested with
difficulty and violence by the oppressed from
the oppressors. If you say that it is better
to endure injustice than to seek justice by
violence, he asks if you regret Runnymede
and the Boston tea-party. If you remark
sententiously that ''nothing is ever achieved
by violence," he retorts with some show of
reason that little has ever been achieved
otherwise. Plead with him to wait patiently
till brotherly love shall accomplish its work,
unaided by coarser powers, he will point
a sinister finger at the workers, for instance,
in the textile industries, remark that he is in a
hurry, and challenge you to adduce specific
instances on your side.

The Church and the Hour 89

And it must be confessed that he has you
in a comer. You search history too often
in vain to refute him. Instances of individual
self-sacrifice are gloriously common: instances
of corporate self-sacrifice are conspicuous by
their absence. The most picturesque instance
does not come from Christendom at all; it is
the abnegation of the Japanese Samurai.

But that such instances have been rare
in the past does not prove that they cannot
occur in the future. Possibilities change.
Democracy sinks in. It is bringing about a
state in which the highest private ethics are
impelled as never before to reproduce them-
selves in the collective ethics of the group.
If its intuitions are genuine, they must en-
gender, not merely neutrality but disinterested
action. It must be proved, not by words
but by deeds, that large masses of people are
more affected by desire for the common good
than by desire to protect their own interests.

Democracy of this type needs a spiritual
instrument. Where can we look for such an
instrument so naturally as to the Christian
Church?

The Church can, to be sure, do little in her

90 The Church and the Hour

corporate capacity. She is a spiritual, not an
economic organism, and as such she can serve
spiritual functions only. But the inspiration
she supplies should guide her children in every
province, and should to-day, above all, direct
them toward social sacrifice. The chief hope
of idealism in the present crisis is in the atti-
tude and action of Christians from the pros-
perous classes. Will they hold to the solid,
imperturbable tenets of their class, stub-
bornly defending a system alien to the spirit
of their Master, even while professing in
jejune generalizations to believe in His ideals?
Or will they afford the most striking instance
in history of a group-consciousness transcend-
ing lower forces, and acting directly from
Above, counter to its own material advantage?

Should they so act, they would furnish
an amazing spectacle indeed: a miracle, if
you will. For class interest is a force so
subtle, imiversal, irresistible, that to bid men
defy it is like bidding the body defy gravita-
tion, the lungs refuse to breathe.

Is it not thinkable that to the end of just
this miracle, the strildng transference of
Christianity from the underworld to the

The Church and the Hour 91

world of comfort and prosperity, was deter-
mined in heavenly councils and brought about
through slow historic process? Future Church
historians may show with dramatic power
how Christianity, at the crisis of its fate, had
insensibly changed from the refuge of the
proletariat to the home of the privileged in
order that a triumphant demonstration of
its divine nature might be afforded by the
action of its followers, who in time of social
revolution were chief agents in destroying
all undue privilege by which they and their
class could profit.

The virtues called for by Christianity are
distinctly supernatural. They run athwart
every instinct of unregenerate man; and
to root them in the himian soil, every advan-
tage had to be taken. Even before the
Christian era much had been done. To give
the human animal the freedom of a higher
than animal life, is a tremendous feat. At
first the process was evident only at rare
points and moments, as in maternal devotion,
where the ego is promoted a little, only a very
little way, out of its own self. When that
potent help to the achievement of the high

92 The Church and the Hour

task, the Christian ideal, entered the world,
it had first to sow its seed among the lower
classes, because those classes could foster
that seed best. Such conditions as Christianity
found for its inception in Judaea, and en-
countered during its early progress in the
Roman Empire, were a necessity for its
survival. Renunciation, pity, meekness, had
to commend themselves first to those who
knew how to pity because they had suffered,
to renounce because they had never possessed,
who by force of their outward situation were
prepared to find joy in persecution, peace in
subjection, immortal hope in their lack of
earthly good.

To their amazement they did find these
things and found them precious. In the
midst of their chains they became free, not
by shaking off the chains, but by learning
that in bondage is truest freedom. Disci-
plined through the ages in the mystic Christian
joy, that joy became to them so intensely
real that the wistful world of wealth and suc-
cess, looking in their faces, reluctantly acknowl-
edged a sweetness beyond all it had to give,
and discovered itself an-hungered for the

The Church and the Hour 93

secret blessings of those beneath its feet.
So even the prosperous and the happy learned
to set their affections on things Above.

But the story could not end there. The
Christian virtues may take long centuries
to strike deep roots in lives not forced to them
by circumstance; but the time comes when,
if they are so rooted, they must blossom in
triimiphant and supernatural beauty. Other-
wise our planet is a moral tragedy among the
spheres.

To-day, after nineteen hundred years, we
hope for a season of blossom. Because the
majority of Christian folk are now born not
to want but to reasonable comfort, they can,
if they will, demonstrate practically that
comfort is matter of indifference to them
compared with love. In no fantastic asceti-
cism but in sober modern fashion, let them
renounce luxury in consumption, greed in
acquisition, permitting their light to shine by
allowing their motives to be known. Let
them remember that there is that scattereth
and yet increaseth. Above all, let them as
members of the body politic and industrial
quietly throw their adherence on the side of

94 The Church and the Hour

justice to the dispossessed, or, if this phrase
does not appeal to them, of generosity to the
weak.

Never have Christian people had a more
dramatic opportunity. Will they embrace it?
When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find
faith on the earth?

TWO LETTERS TO ''THE MASSES"^

The Alasses is a radical weekly published
in New York. It is clever, searching, clear-
purposed, and bitterly anti-ecclesiastical. Its
scathing cartoons well deserve attention from
church-loving persons ; as in the case of a draw-
ing of prosperous clergy feasting at a table over
which hangs a crucifix; below, a citation from
the Times stating the cost of a clerical dinner
to have been $5.00 — or was it $10.00? —
a plate; above, the caption. Their Last
Supper,

But while the satire stings, some of it is
grossly unfair, notably the contemptuous and
ignorant attitude toward Christian dogma.
Certain skits, imitating from afar the light
irony of Anatole France, but unrelieved, to
some minds at least, by Gallic delicacy or
point, excited much criticism a year or two
ago. These skits called forth a number of

' Reprinted from The Masses, Dec., 1915, and Feb., 1916.
95

96 The Church and the Hour

letters, some protesting, some applauding,
which the editors published in amusing juxta-
position. The quotations from the corre-
spondence which follow are reprinted with the
thought that they may indicate conditions in
sincere radical minds which the Christian
apologist must meet:

"Editors of The Masses,

''Gentlemen: You sent me an appeal for
subscribers. Slowly and lazily I had just
reached the point of getting you one when I
received the ' Heavenly Dialogue * in your last
month's issue. You will get no subscribers
through me. I am not afraid of blasphemy,
as I do not think the eternal verities are ever
injured by it, and I like and approve sharp,
clever attacks on all that is false and conven-
tional in religion. But the smart and cheap
vulgarity of that thing was too much for me.
It is a pity.

*'I have read few remarks about the war that
struck home to me as did those by Max East-
man in the same number. . . .

**I wish The Masses could manage to avoid
offensiveness with no sacrifice of its trenchant

The Church and the Hour 97

quality, and I think it could, perfectly well, if
the editors chose to do so. . . .

'* Fraternally and cordially,

"ViDAD. SCUDDER.'*

A Western correspondent wrote:

''Keep hammering away at the failure of us
who profess faith in the Lord Jesus Christ —
we need it: we must never think we are
following his ideals as closely as smug com-
placency suggests. But please do not serve up
in your columns more of such articles as that
to which I have referred, which alienate
without benefiting — and which are in bad
taste, I firmly believe.'*

The Masses retorted:

''Such a letter one can hardly answer at
all, so remote is its viewpoint, and yet so
warm its good-will. It is as if a being from
some other planetary system should write in,
asking why we asstmie that every heavy thing
drops to the earth. We wonder how this
being who lives under the Lord Jesus as an
anthropomorphic God, ever wandered into the
orbit of The Masses — and yet, now that he is
there, we would like to hold his interest and

98 The Church and the Hour

faith, for he evidently has a little faith in
us.

"And perhaps there is some ground for it.
We believe in Jesus. We believe that he lived
and died laboring and fighting, in a noble
atmosphere of disreputability, for the welfare
and liberty of man. To us his memory is the
memory of a hero, and perhaps a good deal of
our indignation against the Church rises from
that. We are indignant, not only because the
Church is reactionary, but because the Church
betrayed Jesus. The Church took Christ^s
name and then sold out to the ruling classes.
The Church is Judas. And to us that little
immaculate ikon that sits at the right hand of
the image of God in Heaven is a part of the
whole traitorous procedure. Whoever puts
Jesus up there dodges Him down here — that
has been our experience. Look into your
mind and find out whether it is Jesus of
Nazareth that you want to defend against
satire, or a certain paste-and-water conception
of Him which assuredly needs your defense."

It seemed worth while to comment a little
further on this correspondence, so the follow-
ing letter was written:

The Church and the Hour 99

*'To the Editor:

''With 'inward glee' if not with 'serious
faith/ I read your Talk on Editorial Pohcy,
wherein you print letters from candid friends,
including myself, neutralizing each other.
They are good fim.

"But I am moved to tell you something.
It is apropos of the letter from California and
your comment on it.

"What I want to tell you is that you have
no cause for surprise at the sympathy of ' this
being* for The Masses. He does not stand
alone. It is high time for you to recognize that
anti-Church radicals do not absorb radicalism
any more than Church-members absorb Chris-
tianity. The old creeds are not dead, though
impassioned believers in them are not often
met, according to my experience, in 'cultured
Boston' or its suburbs — or anywhere else.
They exist, however, these believers — men
and women who consider themselves, not
merely with you, admirers of a dead martyr-
hero, but disciples of a Living Lord. Among
these disciples a considerable number find the
pungent and penetrating treatment of Churchi-
anity and civilization in The Masses as wel-

100 The Church and the Hour

come as flowers in May. They agree with you
not all the time, but much of the time, and
they give thanks for you and wish they were
clever enough to do so too.

''For among those who know an interior
union with the Living Christ (pardon the
strange language) He is manifest more and
more as the Christ of the Revolution.

''Of course, this vision of Him was long
obscured. But it has never been lost. In
the unpromising eighteenth century, William
Blake defiantly proclaimed it :

' The vision of Christ which thou dost see
Is my vision*s greatest enemy.
Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou readest black where I read white.

Where'er His chariot took its way.
The gates of death let in the day* —

"So long as the Gospels are read aloud
Sunday after Sunday in church, the vision
can't be lost. It bides its time, it finds its
own. It is most compelling to-day among

The Church and the Hour loi

those who believe, — they really do, I assure
you, — that He who was executed by the
combined forces of the religious, intellectual,
and governing classes of His day, is to be the
Judge of the human race.

"In gently assuming that no intelligent
person who enjoys The Masses holds this
extraordinary hope, Mr. Editor, you are
provincial. Please socialize your mind!
Please open imagination to the fact of which
I inform you, — that there are plenty of people
ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with
you in the fight for a clean, just, democratic
civilization, who get authentic inspiration
from sources closed to you. And don't sneer
at their sanctities; it isn't worth while. The
most seeming-obsolete formula is likely to
have a sacred heart beating in it. It has
meant, at all events, something profound in
human experience. Were I in Buddha-land,
I should never make fun of even the most
crude and popular forms of Buddha-worship.
Were I among the Turks, I should say my
prayers in the Mosques — always supposing
(I am hazy on this point) — that they would
admit a lady. The Masses lives in a country

102 The Church and the Hour

where a great deal of real Christianity sur-
vives— though I confess that appearances
rather contradict the assertion. It wouldn't
do you a bit of harm to show a little respect for
it. For the amazing truth of the old Christian
formulas is plain to the experience of thousands,
and great tides of Christian mysticism are
rising to refresh the arid souls of our generation.
*'I hardly expect you to be interested in all
this. And nobody is trying to convert you.
You are doing a lot of good just where you are,
and we all have eternity, and possibly many
lives ahead even on earth, in which to learn
things we don't know. But as we muddle
along together, it should be possible to believe
people who tell us that they see a light we
don't, and to accept them courteously as
fellow-pilgrims toward the City of Equity.
*Tratemally yours,

^^ViDAD. SCUDDER."

WHY DOES NOT THE CHURCH TURN
SOCIALIST?^

A PERTINENT question! For according to
the Church's formulae one would have ex-
pected it to turn SociaHst long ago. Wasn't
it started Socialist? Did not its founder assert
with vigor that an abundance of private
possessions was bad and dangerous for a man?
Did He not by deliberate choice announce
His Good News to the poor, and establish prin-
ciples that would make it impossible for any
honest follower to fight for his own advantage,
or to possess while other men lacked? Did
He not go about proclaiming a revolutionary
social order w^hich He called the Kingdom of
Heaven, and does not clear thinking show that
socialism is the only economic basis which
would ever give this ideal of His a thorough and
fair chance? Finally, because He would not

I Reprinted from a Socialist publication, The Coming Nation,
March, 19 13.

103

104 The Church and the Hour

give up his convictions or change His methods,
did not the civil and reHgious authori-
ties, with just instinct from their point of
view, execute Him as a revolutionist and
agitator?

Well, then ! Why has his Church not turned
out a revolutionary and Socialist body?

Your glib answer is ready to the question.

The Church is one thing, you say with a
shrug: Jesus is quite another.

The Church does not turn Socialist because
it is false to its Master; because ever since the
time of Constantine it has flouted His ideas,
misused His name, and has in these latter days
at least, whatever may have been true earlier,
become a stronghold of enmity to the people,
and to the cause for which He died.

There is some force to this answer; but it is
altogether too facile. Nothing in the world is
so simple as all that. True, it does certainly
look as if the Church might crucify Jesus all
over again, did He appear among us. And we
have to confess that it has crucified Him
over and over, down the last two thousand
years. Nevertheless, it still bears His name
and includes many of His sincere followers.

The Church and the Hour 105

The situation demands that we probe
deeper.

And the moment we do so we see that there
is no use in pummeHng the Church as if it
were a person. Deahng the ecclesiastical
world ''slaps and slams" in the elegant phrase
of a socialist contemporary is an easy and
stimulating exercise, but a silly one; for there
is really nothing around to be hit. The Church
is an extremely complex proposition.

Seek for it with your sociological spy-glass,
and it evades you. Which Church? Where?
For the purposes of the present discussion, the
Church cannot be considered as one corporate
being endowed with independent life. Neither
can it be identified with its leaders or official
spokesmen, be they bishops or just plain
ministers or even vestrymen and deacons.
The Church is a vast association of baptized
persons, presenting immense variety in outlook,
attitude, and creed, held together by a force
somewhat difficult to define.

This association has been in existence a
long while and has lived through many social
orders. It gets its color from these orders but
it has never been identical with any of them;

io6 The Church and the Hour

in one way it has nothing to do with politics
or sociology. It cannot officially turn socialist
as a corporate body, any more than it could
turn imperialist under the Roman Empire, or
feudal imder feudalism, or capitalistic imder
capitalism.

Partisanship in politics or economics is as
much out of its corporate province as partisan-
ship on these lines would be to a botanical
association or a football team. The only way
in which this association can turn Socialist is
for the majority of the individuals composing it
to turn Socialist ; and this is what we really are
watching for and are surprised not to see.

Now, the force that unites these individuals
in the vital Church, the working Church, is the
belief that they have something precious to
guard. Brotherhood? Yes; but something
also deeper and more sacred than brotherhood.

You may think that there is nothing deeper
or more sacred. You may hold that brother-
hood is the essence of religion, and all there is
to it. You have a right to your opinion ; but
that is where good Christians, not to speak of
good Buddhists, and Jews, and Mohammedans
and Bahaists, differ from you.

The Church and the Hour 107

This most precious thing which the Church
exists to guard is the fellowship of finite and
transitory man with Infinite and Uncreated
Love.

Mystical delusion you say? Very well,
though it seems somewhat unscientific to
dismiss lightly with an impatient phrase an
experience which has been from the dawn of
time the central passion and the supreme
desire, a sustaining power, a consolation, and
a light, to unnumbered throngs of every con-
tinent and every tongue. Pure religious as-
piration is intangible, but it is mighty. From
land to land, from age to age, it may change its
formulas, but it never abandons its essence.
And those who know can tell us that it never
was more profoundly operative than to-
day.

However, we are expounding just now — not
attacking, or defending. And we hasten to
add, for the benefit of the practically disposed,
that this insistent craving for fellowship with
the imseen is not the only factor in the bond
that unites Church and people. It carries
with it of necessity a further emphasis. For
in the Church it is held that such fellowship

io8 The Church and the Hour

can be attained only through growth in
holiness.

Now, holiness is only another word for
character raised to its highest possibilities.

It means in each individual a triumph of the
higher nature over the lower, tritmiph won by
fierce and endless moral struggle, of which the
seat is the individual heart. The achievement
of such triumph on the part of as many
individuals as possible is the one matter of
importance in the world. Hopelessly in-
dividualistic, you perceive. Still, the race
does happen to be made up of individuals.

Even to appraise the value of an economic
scheme, you have to get back to your in-
dividual every time. At all events, character
is the word of the Church — involving on the
lower levels morality or faithfulness to the law
of right; on the higher levels, holiness, or
unity with the law of love ; and always imply-
ing the possibility, clouded, dim, yet infinitely
precious, of fellowship with what lies beyond
the world of sense.

The Church perceives or thinks she does
that these things can be and are attained under
all conceivable variety of economic circum-

The Church and the Hour 109

stance; and therefore she is inchned not to
care a rap whether people are rich or poor and
whether they Hve in comfort or discomfort.

Even with the ethical stress, this whole
scheme of things is foolishness to those
modems, if such there be, who hold that good
housing conditions and adequate reward for
every man are the omega as well as the alpha
of human needs ; also to those others, indubi-
tably numerous, who are convinced that the
study of natural law, with the pursuit of
"arts yet unimagined yet to be" is going to
satisfy the hunger for a vision of Truth beyond
the edge of the world.

But these modems must realize how
ardently the people who fill the churches
believe the other way. All church folk to
whom religion is a reality speak a language of
their own. They are sure that they, with any
others who recognize the human need for that
great fellowship with the Unseen God, alone
"inhabit reality," to use James's admirable
phrase. And the reason they do not turn
socialist is their fear that socialism, especially
as it is currently presented, threatens the
power to achieve such fellowship.

no The Church and the Hour

They do not feel that people if released from
economic bondage will be any more likely to
become heirs to the old title, ''Friends of
God/' They are full of terror lest a concen-
tration of the public mind on the goods of the
flesh should blind it to the goods of the Spirit;
lest socialism should persuade men to a lazy
idea that the race will be made good by rote
when the socialist state arrives, and that
meanwhile we fulfill our whole duty if we
agitate for this state, relaxing all stress on the
ancient tussle for individual self-restraint and
goodness.

The religious world, so far as it holds aloof
from socialism, inclines to one of two attitudes.
Either it thinks that socialism offers a low
substitute for religion, mere wheat bread for
the Bread of Life, in which case it regards
socialism as an enemy; or else it thinks as we
were saying that economic circumstance bears
no relation to character, in which case it
regards socialism as irrelevant.

How full we are of answers — we Christians
who happen to be socialists! The present
writer has recently written a whole book to
prove to her fellow-Christians how wrong

The Church and the Hour iii

they are. We are in a hurry to say that the
Food of ImmortaHty can be sacramentally
conveyed only through common bread and
wine; that In the blessed oneness of being,
soul helps flesh **no more than flesh helps
soul, " so that our plain business is to make the
flesh of all men healthful and wholesome; and
we point with horror to the Satanic forces of
Disease and Apathy brooding sinister over
factory and slum.

I am afraid that we socialist Christians en-
joy hearing St. James say to the capitalists,
especially those who fill the churches: Go to
now, weep and howl ! Certainly we hold with
John that if a man does not love his brother
whom he has seen he is not likely to love God
whom he has not seen ; and just as we perceive
(what many good people curiously fail to) that
the brotherhood of man implies Fatherhood —
somewhere — so we see that a universal Father-
hood implies a brotherhood not of our seeking
but of divine ordaining.

Probably a majority of people in the
churches now get as far as this. There is a
quite general loathing of self-centered spiri-
tuaUty to-day and a strong reaction^ rom

112 The Church and the Hour ^

nursing our own souls while babies are making
artificial flowers. And a signifi.cant minority
gets further. It sees that socialism is the only
effective way at this stage of social evolution
of practicing himian fellowship, and so reach-
ing fellowship with God.

This minority in the Church Is very firm in
its conviction. It is quite sure that faith in
Dante's ''Love that moves the sun and the
other stars'' is in the long nm the only asset
that separates man from brute; but it is also
equally sure that socialism will prove favor-
able to the full expansion of such faith and
that the socialist reorganization of society is
the only way to give the endless struggle for
the perfecting of individual character, which
is the condition of spiritual vision, any kind
of a fair show.

We try our best to show this to all our fellow-
Christians. But still they hesitate. Still they
tell us that there is danger lest the precious
things attained by blood and tears and anguish
be all thrown away, lest moral freedom be
abolished by our system, and the race sink
back into a dreary vulgarity, a kind of ethical
Philistinism, with no romance of the spirit, no

- The Church and the Hour 113

fine heroisms, no more quest for the light that
glimmers at the horizon's verge.

Their fears sound ^plausible. We must do
justice to their honesty: to that jealous, ser-
ious passion for moral and spiritual values
which is in great part the source of the diffi-^
culty felt by religious people in accepting
Socialism.

We of the minority can hardly refrain from
retorting, however, that if economic comfort
be a dangerous condition, or an irrelevant one,
it is strange that church members should for
the most part cling to it so tenaeiously — and
possess so very large a share of it, compared
with the babies making artificial flowers.

Honest church people have an interesting
answer ready. They have to grant us some-
thing, and they point to St. Francis, or to his
theories, and tell us that we are right in a
degree, but that the way out is not to press
socialism but to persuade them and their like
to a voluntary sacrifice of their possessions.

Now there is a great deal to be said about
this answer which cannot be said to-day. But
it certainly does sound just a little academic
and Utopian — and the babies continue to

114 The Church and the Hour

starve. Meantime it points us to other
factors in the situation less noble than those
we have been considering, yet important to
keep in mind if we are looking for a straight
answer to our question.

The Church has that inward life on which
we have been dwelling. But it has an outward
life also. And this outward life is largely
dependent on the offerings of the well-to-do
classes. It is certainly a far cry from Fifth
Avenue ecclesiastical architecture to the shores
of the Lake of Galilee; yet by natural process
of growth, Fifth Avenue Church edifices have
appeared.

The Church is an institution maintaining
buildings and officials and an enormous
quantity of charitable work, excellently well
meant, however shortsighted. Now the in-
ward life is by far the deeper and more
important. It is what holds the whole thing
together. Were it conceivable that the crav-
ing for imion with God should cease in the
hearts of men, the Church would vanish
within a generation. All the handsome
church buildings, the vested choirs, the
eloquent preachers, the full congregations,

The Church and the Hour 115

would ''like the cloudy fabric of a vision leave
not a rack behind, " if once the race lost sight
of that faint gleam — on the clouds is it? Or
shining from a land very far off, beyond the
confines of sense? But so long as that craving
endures, churches will be built, — and perhaps
the building of them will always hurt and
hamper the freedom of the exploring mind.

The paradox of the situation reacts pain-
fully on the hearts of church people, espe-
cially of officials. How can they imperil their
hold on the community which supports the
Church and all its works, by joining forces
with those who would menace the very basis
on which that community rests? It is not in
most cases a crude question with clergymen of
retaining their jobs, though this consideration
has to come in; it is rather a question of the
enterprises which they father. And there are
many drawn to the Socialist faith who, for one
or the other reason, do not dare to join us.

At least three clergymen of good standing
in their respective communions have avowed
this to the writer within the year. ''Wait till
I educate my children," said one. "I do not
wish to lose the power for good, and indirectly

Ii6 The Church and the Hour

for socialism, which I now exert through an
academic chair/' said the second. ''You see,'*
sighed the third, "we carry on schools, and
if I were to join the socialist party, those
schools would be ruined."

Lamentable enough. Yet even in these
cases the reasons for hesitation were not
wholly ignoble. Mere counsels of prudence
and timidity would never have prevailed with
these honest and devoted men.

Further conversation revealed the strong
feeling in all of them, — and it is a feeling very
wide-spread, — that while socialism was doubt-
less the true economic doctrine, the socialist
movement in America was too materialistic,
autocratic, and quarrelsome for churchmen to
join without endorsing a spirit which they
were bound to disapprove. The confusion of
motive was very bad for them, and for us.

What to do about the situation? Well, we
are not concerned to-day with answers,- -
and my space is gone.

One trouble is that Nature expects us to be
enthusiastic about a number of things at
once, and we all find it hard to obey. We can-
not respond to the amplitude of her demands.

The Church and the Hour 117

We do not manage half as well as Humpty
Dumpty in Alice, who had trained himself
to believe as many as ten impossible things
before breakfast; we can hardly ever believe
more than one at a time. Nature herself does
many things all at once, but when she desires
to get a piece of work done by men, says
Emerson somewhere, she evolves a type of
people who feel that the achievement of that
one end is the only thing which matters in the
universe.

So orthodox church people, believing in-
tensely that the growth of the soul is the only
important thing, find it hard not to distrust
the sociaHsts, who so hate cant about the soul
that they never mention the organ. Orthodox
socialists meanwhile, thinking it supremely
important that babies should not make arti-
ficial flowers, find it hard not to be a little
contemptuous of people who stay aloof from
the great modern struggle for economic
freedom.

Yet there is no logical reason why socialists
should not care for spiritual values, and
religious people care for social justice. There
is every reason why they should, for the indica-

ii8 The Church and the Hour

tions are that Nature has both at heart, and
that neither cause can in the long run flourish
without the other. Perhaps sociahsts and
Christians alike will learn this some day. So
far as the Church is concerned, there is always
that strong and growing minority. Give us
time.

In England, they say that the advance of
socialism depends largely on the church vote.
Ten more years here in the United States, and
who knows what may happen? Especially if
socialists should get more in the habit of
acknowledging that the soul is of importance.

A PLEA FOR SOCIAL INTERCESSION

Everyone knows that religion is under-
going a social revival. Where our fathers
agonized over sins of the inner man, we
lament our social crimes. Where they
analyzed their relations to God, we analyze
our relations to our brothers. Perhaps we
are less conscious than the Puritans were of
loving Him whom no man hath seen at any
time, — but we are a great deal more conscious
of loving our fellow-men.

The change of attitude may entail loss as
well as gain. If it means pragmatic indiffer-
ence to the things of the spirit, it means loss.
If it means that anything, however lovely and
sacred, supplants in the soul the supreme
desire for the Living God, it cuts life at the
heart-root, and though the plant may still
seem green and fresh for a time, slow death is
on the way. There is reason to fear that
modem social feeling does have these bad

119

120 The Church and the Hour

tendencies sometimes. The quest for union
with Eternal Love is a stem and fearsome
thing, and men are always seeking facile
substitutes. So they try to replace this quest
by a vague humanitarian ardor, press the
sure truth that laborare est orare to the point
of eliminating orare altogether, and make a
religion out of ministering to the poor and
working for social justice. When they feel
the need for more contemplation, as every-
body does at times, they betake them if they
can to the great woods and relax pleasantly
as they enjoy Nature. These people are
repeating in modem fashion the specious error
of the old "Quietists, " whom Ruysbroek so
dreaded in the fourteenth century. For they
are without that "eternal hunger which shall
never more be satisfied ; it is an inward craving
and hankering of the loving power and the
created spirit after an imcreated Good."
''Fruitive love," which is the old mystic's
final phrase for the ideal life, is denied to
them: Instead of this, they "enter into rest
through mere nature . . . and this rest may
be found and possessed within themselves by
all creatures, without the grace of God. . . .

The Church and the Hour 121

In this bare vacancy, the rest is pleasant and
great.'* . . . ''This rest is in itself no sin,"
says Ruysbroek, but it has no relation to ''the
supernatural rest which one possesses in God.'*
However much such people may be addicted
to good works, they can never, he says, enter
the arcana.

A condition like this is lamentable and
superficial. Yet no one would lose out from
religion that intense social preoccupation
which is now seizing on it. For a mighty
force is regenerating the whole body of the
Church. The recovery of social emphasis in
the spiritual life is the great means by which
our age is getting "back to Christ," who in
nearly all His teachings was primarily con-
cerned with mens' relations to one another.
We can pray the Lord's Prayer as it has not
been prayed since the days of the Master,
and we are learning the force of the sequence
in the petitions. "Hallowed be Thy Name":
the attainment of a lofty, holy, hallowed
conception of God is humanity's first need.
"Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, on
earth": the coming of the Kingdom, the true
social order over which God can reign un-

122 The Church and the Hour

challenged and supreme, precedes the doing
of the Will, which is the personal, intimate ful-
fillment, of the Divine life within. And then,
descending to the present level from that
aspiration toward ultimate ideals which
prayer must never forfeit or postpone, the
petitions for immediate needs. " Give us this
DAY our daily bread " : let all himianity receive
the physical nourishment which it requires,
"Forgive as we forgive," — we are negatively
indulgent enough sometimes toward sinners
but do we forgive them quite as we want
God to forgive us? *^Lead us not into
temptation, deliver us from evil,'' — and our
whole industrial system adapted it would seem
almost deliberately to tempt the strong and
to betray the weak! The great petitions are
a social program in themselves, which if we
live as we pray will carry us far indeed toward
expressing the Mind of Christ in a new order
of Christian living.

No, we cannot give up our social vision
and we may not give up our ancient quest.
Rightly understood, each fulfills the other.
And in one special way they meet. It is the
Way of Prayer, modeled on the Prayer of

The Church and the Hour 123

the Lord, the Way of Intercession. Through
intercession, the old type of religion is one
with the new, and aspiration rises Godward
even while tenderness holds humanity in its
embrace.

Intercession is the counterpart in the life
within of social work in the Hfe without. Of
all effective work it is the soul. In vain does
the Church create social service commissions,
and announce fairly drastic programs of social
reform. In vain does the community estab-
lish associations to fight every evil under the
sun, organize efficient relief for its social
victims, and grope toward new industrial
ideals. All this is good, and one rejoices that
whatever a man's tastes and convictions, there
is a place for him in the social crusade. It is
good, it is necessary; but at times it all turns
to ashes in the mouth. We look abroad, and
*' brothers" in the awkward words of a well-
meaning hymn, are still ''engaging." We
look at home, and we know that nobody is
living as St. Francis would live, or St. John.
Are we, for that matter, living as Jesus would
have us live? Here is a graver question:
whose conscience is wholly free? Futility and

124 The Church and the Hour

helplessness press us down. In the night-
silence, our fussy energies seem pretty poor
things, pretty useless.

And all the while we have power — sure
power — power that goes straight to the mark.
Truly, truly, Christ says to us, Whatsoever
ye ask in My Name, I will do it.

Whatsoever! And what are we asking?
Let us examine our prayers. How languid
they are, how perfunctory, and alas! how
often selfish! Sometimes one feels that men's
prayers must sadden God even more than
their sins. Prayer is the deepest and surest
measure of personaHty. As men pray, so
they really are. For people do pray even in
these imbelieving days for what they want
intensely. When a dear friend is in peril,
they pray. When they encoimter personal
crisis, they pray. When they see a glorious
sunset, they instinctively lift their hearts to
the Source of Light. But prayer must be
more than instinct or sudden emotion, it
must be the habit of the disciplined Christian
life. A force more penetrating and powerful
than gravitation or electricity is entrusted to
us, and we are responsible for the steady use

The Church and the Hour 125

of It and its direction to the noblest ends. Do
men look to wide horizons, do they ask great
things? Or is their inward life self -centered
even while the outer may be filled with fine
impersonal interests? If they really want
social justice they will pray for it; activities
are not worth much unless they constantly
turn into upward-leaping desire.

Some people think themselves religious
just because they like to pray and to go to
church. And of course that is something,
but it is not very much. To spend our pre-
cious time for prayer, — usually scant at best,
— in begging for personal gifts and graces or
in enjoyment of personal consolations is as
selfish as to spend active lives in pursuit of
personal gain, and one can be as greedy in
spiritual affairs as in any others. The time
can go in asking for health or wealth or suc-
cess or affection or pleasure or peace; it can
go in asking similar gifts for friends, which
is very much better. But do most people
get farther than their own circle? Does
their prayer reveal that the rescue of chil-
dren from wage-slavery, of men from condi-
tions that stifle manhood, of women from

126 The Church and the Hour

the manifold evils which weigh them down, is
a potent and passionate desire? Prayer is
the desire most native to the soul tiimed God-
ward, and egotism at the center of the soul's
life is an awful thing.

It is the impression of such egotism conveyed
by the life of many mystics and holy men,
which has caused, often unjustly, the reaction
against them. But how great, how subtle,
the danger! The best way of escaping it
without running into the opposite danger is
the practice of intercession. For by inter-
cession, life at the center, life in the sanctuary,
may be purified from self and lost that it may
be found. Also, life is energized; for right
praying involves hard thinking, and the mind
addicted to indolent evasion will never kindle
the sacred fire. God sets no limit to audacious
importimity. Men may ask for the greatest
things, for the industrial and political peace
of the world, for imiversal justice. But if
their prayers are to prevail, they must avoid
all lazy generalizations, they must have point
and precision of aim. In proportion as they
attain breadth, point, and ardor, the hidden
life turned inward will be cleansed from selfish-

The Church and the Hour 127

ness and the life turned outward from arro-
gance or discouragement, and the kingdom
will come faster than men dream.

There is secret sacrifice involved in placing
special emphasis on Intercession. It is the
sacrifice demanded by an age peculiarly called
to labor for social ideals. Petition at highest
is only a small part of prayer. Praise is a
blessed duty, confession of sin a necessity:
above all other forms comes that pure single
concentrated Practise of the Presence of God
whence flows all peace and power. Consider-
ing the richness of the life hid with Christ in
God through prayer, one cannot marvel if
it drew men of old away from all earthly pur-
suits to an exclusive consecration. But the
Via Contemplativa is to-day the way for very-
few; and perhaps precisely in the sacrifice of
dearer energies, the subordination of possible
hidden joys, lies part of our expiation for com-
mtmal guilt. The joys may wait on that
great day when the redeemed of the Lord
shall come to Zion with songs and with ever-
lasting joy upon their heads. Here and now,
God may best be fotind by those who in the
secret life forever deny in part even their

128 The Church and the Hour

higher desires, that they may Hft the sorrow-
ful needs of the world up to his Heart of
Mercy.

Through Intercession, the handicapped, the
sick, the feeble, the inhibited from action,
can find their place, can march shoulder to
shoulder with the vigorotis, or perhaps can
lead the march, in the inspiriting advance
toward the Kingdom of Justice. Legislative
reforms, and greater things, may be achieved
by desires rising from some obscure bed of
pain. Yet this is no mere work for private
initiative, it is also a work for the Church.
Men grope to discover how an aroused Chris-
tian community can react on the social situa-
tion through its ecclesiastical machinery; the
answer is difficult, opinions vary. Some say
that the clergy should throw themselves into
politics, some that they should stay out.
Some want institutional churches, some de-
spise them. Some wish the Church to inau-
gurate social service under her own name,
others think that if she does she will simply
chip in at cross purposes to wiser secular agen-
cies. But one thing the churches surely can
do without harming or interfering, — they can

The Church and the Hour 129

summon people to pray for social justice, and
they can teach them how. In a parish or a
diocese, or in the Church universal, why should
not a Novena or a Week of Prayer be now and
then proclaimed against some shocking evil
— child labor, or the White Slave traffic?
If Christian people threw themselves heartily
and reverently into such a scheme and got
themselves ready for prayer by becoming
intelligent on the issue, what an access to
zeal would ensue on the merely himian side!
And in that unseen region whither prayers
wing their flight, who can tell what forces
would be set in motion?

Phillips Brooks used to tell how a number of
good Episcopalians got together at the time
of the great Boston fire and said the Litany,
''And there was a provision in it for every-
thing under the sun,'* said he, "except for
a burning city.'' Obviously, this special
Church has been sadly in need of more flexi-
bility, and she has been gaining it lately.
Intercession services are common and in-
creasingly prized. Cannot they be more
vigorously turned toward social salvation,
while losing none of their fervor for missions,

130 The Church and the Hour

for parochial ends, for individual needs?
Will not the numerous Guilds of Prayer
develop social intercession? One such guild
at least is especially pledged to pray for the
reconciliation of classes, and so, whenever a
great strike or labor war is in progress, hun-
dreds of people all over the country are en-
treating, with what ardor God and their
conscience vouchsafe, not that one side or
the other may triumph necessarily, but that
brotherhood may prevail.

Yet there is no need to wait for corporate
action. Let every man examine his private
life. Is he satisfied with the idea God gains
of him from his prayers? In prayer more
than in any other pursuit one must be honest ;
there is danger in pretending to desire what
one does not really care about. But also one
may grow. The world-crisis calls men faith-
fully and fervently to enlarge and energize
their life of prayer. So the old and the new
ideals of religious life will be brought into
unison; so the Mystical Body of Christ will
come to her own, in power to help and heal.
Thank God for letting us pray! May we be
worthy of the Gift and the Summons!

THE SIGN OF THE SON OF MAN

Thy Kingdom, Lord, we long for,

Where love shall find its own,
And brotherhood triumphant

Our years of pride disown.
Thy captive people languish

In mill and mart and mine;
We lift to Thee their anguish,

We wait Thy promised Sign!

Thy Kingdom, Lord, Thy Kingdom,

All secretly it grows;
In faithful hearts forever

His seed the Sower sows.
Yet ere its consummation

Must dawn a mighty doom.
For judgment and salvation

The Son of Man shall come.
131

132

The Church and the Hour

If now perchance in tumult

His destined Sign appear, —
The Rising of the People, —

Dispel our coward fear!
Let comforts that we cherish,

Let old tradition die;
Our wealth, our wisdom perish.

So that He draw but nighl

In wrath and revolution

The Sign may be displayed,
But by Thy grace we'll greet it

With spirits unafraid.
The awestruck heart presages

An Advent dread and sure;
It hails the hope of ages —

Its Master in the poor.

Beyond our fierce confusions,
Our strife of speech and sword,

Our wars of class and nation.
We wait Thy certain Word.

The Church and the Hour 133

The meek and poor in spirit

Who in Thy promise trust
The Kingdom shall inherit,

The blessing of the Just.

The End

ir

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